Slavery is alive and well, yet Westerners who ended it in their lands are guilted for it while those same accusers disregard its current practice.
27.6 million people were living under the conditions of forced labor around the world on any given day in 2021, according to data published in a report on Tuesday by the International Labor Organization (ILO).
As Statista’s Anna Fleck reports, this equates to roughly 3.5 people for every 1,000 people worldwide and is an 11 percent increase since 2016, when there were 24.9 million people living in forced labor (3.4 people per 1,000 population). The vast majority of these are thought to have been in privately-imposed forced labor (23.6 million in 2021), rather than state-imposed forced labor (3.9 million in 2021).
The report, titled ‘Profits and poverty: The economics of forced labor’, reveals the extent to which forced labor is a global issue. At 15.1 million, Asia and the Pacific had by far the highest number of people living in forced labor in 2021, accounting for more than half of the global total. Europe and Central Asia was the region with the second biggest absolute number at 4.1 million people, followed by Africa with 3.8 million, the Americas with 3.6 million and the Arab States with 900,000 people living under these conditions.
When looking at prevalence, a different order emerges: the Arab States were the worst offending group of countries that year (5.3 people in forced labor per 1,000 population), followed by Europe and Central Asia (4.4 people per 1,000 population), Asia and the Pacific (3.5 people per 1,000 population), the Americas (3.5 people per 1,000 population) and Africa (2.9 people per 1,000 population).
And the economic scale of illegal forced labor profits is vast.
Forced labor is estimated to generate illegal profits summing to $236 billion in 2024 alone, with exploiters making at average of $9,995 per victim. This is according to a new report by the International Labor Organization (ILO), released Tuesday. This profit represents the wages that “rightfully belong in the pockets of workers that instead remain in the hands of their exploiters as a result of their coercive practices.” It is even a low estimate, since the ILO does not include further illegal profits made through means such as recruitment fees or the money from avoided taxes. Forced labor is here defined as “work that is both involuntary and under penalty or menace of coercion”.
As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the following chart, sexual exploitation is the biggest driver of forced labor profits, accounting for some $172.6 billion worldwide in 2024. This breaks down to a significant amount in all regions, at $58.6 billion in Europe and Central Asia, $48.4 billion in Asia and the Pacific, $34.9 billion in the Americas, $16.1 billion in Africa and $14.6 billion in the Arab States.
Despite making up nearly three quarters (73 percent) of the total illegal profits from forced labor, sexual exploitation accounts for only 27 percent of all people in privately imposed forced labor (i.e. not including state-imposed forced labor). Some of the other major areas for illegal forced labor are industry (including mines and quarrying, manufacturing, construction and utilities), the services sector (including but not limited to wholesale and trade, accommodation and food service activities, transport and storage), the agriculture sector (forestry, hunting, cultivation of crops, livestock production and fishing) and domestic work (in third party households).
According to the ILO’s calculations, illegal profits for forced labor have increased by some $64 billion since 2014 worldwide. This is the result of both more people in forced labor (23.7 million in 2024 versus 18.7 million in 2014) as well as more illegal profit being generated per victim.
