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Forced labour, orunfree labour, is any work relation, especially inmodern orearly modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat ofdestitution,detention, orviolence, including death or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families.[note 1][1]
Unfree labour includes all forms ofslavery,penal labour, and the corresponding institutions, such asdebt slavery,serfdom,corvée andlabour camps.[1]
Many forms of unfree labour are also covered by the termforced labour, which is defined by theInternational Labour Organization (ILO) as all involuntary work or service exacted under the menace of a penalty.[2]
However, under theILOForced Labour Convention of 1930, the term forced or compulsory labour does not include:[3]
If payment occurs, it may be in one or more of the following forms:
Unfree labour is often more easily instituted and enforced on migrant workers, who have travelled far from their homelands and who are easily identified because of their physical, ethnic, linguistic, or cultural differences from the general population, since they are unable or unlikely to report their conditions to the authorities.[4]
Unfree labour re-emerged as an issue in the debate about rural development during the years following the end of the Second World War, when a political concern ofKeynesian theory was not justeconomic reconstruction (mainly in Europe and Asia) but also planning (indeveloping "Third World" nations). A crucial aspect of the ensuing discussion concerned the extent to which different relational forms constituted obstacles to capitalist development, and why.
During the 1960s and 1970s, unfree labour was regarded as incompatible with capitalist accumulation, and thus an obstacle to economic growth, an interpretation advanced by exponents of the then-dominant semi-feudal thesis. From the 1980s onwards, however, another and very different Marxist view emerged, arguing that evidence from Latin America and India suggestedagribusiness enterprises, commercial farmers and rich peasants reproduced, introduced or reintroduced unfree relations.
However, recent contributions to this debate have attempted to exclude Marxism from the discussion. These contributions maintain that, because Marxist theory failed to understand the centrality of unfreedom to modern capitalism, a new explanation of this link is needed. This claim has been questioned byTom Brass.[5] He argues that many of these new characteristics are in fact no different from those identified earlier by Marxist theory and that the exclusion of the latter approach from the debate is thus unwarranted.
TheInternational Labour Organization (ILO) now estimates that at least 27.6 million people are victims of forced labour worldwide on any given day;[6] 86% of forced labour is imposed by private actors: 63% in non-sexual sectors and 23% in commercial sexual exploitation.[6] State authorities account for the remaining 14%.[6] The forced labour prevalence of adult migrant workers is more than 3x higher than that of adult non-migrant workers.[6] From aninternational law perspective, countries that allow forced labour are violatinginternational labour standards as set forth in the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention (C105), one of the fundamental conventions of the ILO.[7]
According to theILO Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour (SAP-FL), global profits from forced trafficked labour exploited by private agents are estimated at US$44.3 billion per year. About 70% of this value (US$31.6 billion) comes from trafficked victims. At least the half of this sum (more than US$15 billion) comes from industrialised countries.[8]
Trafficking is a term to define the recruiting, harbouring, obtaining and transportation of a person by use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjecting them to involuntary acts, such as acts related to commercial sexual exploitation (includingforced prostitution) or involuntary labour.[9]
Slavery was common in manyancient societies, includingancient Egypt,Babylon,Persia,ancient Greece,Rome,ancient China,the pre-modern Muslim world, as well as many societies inAfrica andthe Americas. Being sold into slavery was a common fate of populations that were conquered in wars.
Chattel Slavery is an extreme form of unfree labour in which people are legally regarded as property for life and are subject to being bought, sold, or transferred by their owners, and typically receive no personal benefit from their work.[10] One of the most widespread and systematized forms of chattel slavery occurred during the transatlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries. During this period, it is estimated that between 10 million and 12 millionBlack Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.[11] Many were taken through theMiddle Passage to Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. In these systems, slavery was typically hereditary, with the legal status of enslavement passed from parent to child. Smaller numbers of enslaved Africans were brought to Europe, and others were also trafficked through thetrans-Saharan andIndian Ocean slave trades. These systems varied significantly in structure, scale, and legal status and were not always chattel in form.
The term "slavery" is often applied to situations which do not meet the above definitions, but which are other, closely related forms of unfree labour, such asdebt slavery or debt-bondage (although not all repayment of debts through labour constitutes unfree labour).
In late 16th century Japan, "unfree labour" orslavery was officially banned; but forms of contract and indentured labour persisted alongside the period's penal codes' forced labour. Somewhat later, theEdo period's penal laws prescribed "non-free labour" for the immediate families of executed criminals in Article 17 of theGotōke reijō (Tokugawa House Laws), but the practice never became common. The 1711Gotōke reijō was compiled from over 600 statutes that were promulgated between 1597 and 1696.[12]
According toKevin Bales inDisposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999), there are now an estimated 27 million slaves in the world.[13][14]
Serfdom bonds labourers to the land they farm, typically in afeudal society. Serfs typically have no legal right to leave, change employers, or seek paid work, though depending on economic conditions many did so anyway. Unlike chattel slaves, they typically cannot be sold separately from the land, and have rights such as the military protection of the lord.
A truck system, in the specific sense in which the term is used bylabour historians, refers to an unpopular or even exploitative form of payment associated with small, isolated and/or rural communities, in which workers orself-employed small producers are paid in either: goods, a form of payment known astruck wages, or tokens,private currency ("scrip") or direct credit, to be used at acompany store, owned by their employers. A specific kind of truck system, in which credit advances are made against future work, is known in the U.S. asdebt bondage.
Many scholars have suggested that employers use such systems to exploit workers and/or indebt them. This could occur, for example, if employers were able to pay workers with goods which had a market value below the level ofsubsistence, or by selling items to workers at inflated prices. Others argue that truck wages were a convenient way for isolated communities, such as during the early colonial settlement of North America, to operate when official currency was scarce.[15]
By the early 20th century, truck systems were widely seen, inindustrialised countries, as exploitative; perhaps the most well-known example of this view was a 1947 U.S. hit song "Sixteen Tons". Many countries haveTruck Act legislation that outlaws truck systems and requires payment in cash.
Though most closely associated withMedieval Europe, governments throughout human history have imposed regular short stints of unpaid labour upon lower social classes. These might be annual obligations of a few weeks or something similarly regular that lasted for the labourer's entire working life. As the system developed in the Philippines and elsewhere, the labourer could pay an appropriate fee and be exempted from the obligation.[16]
A form of forced labour in which peasants and members of lower castes were required to work for free existed in India before independence. This form of labour was known by several names, includingveth,vethi,vetti-chakiri andbegar .[17][18]
Another historically significant example of forced labour was that ofpolitical prisoners, people from conquered or occupied countries, members of persecuted minorities, andprisoners of war, especially during the 20th century. The best-known example of this are theconcentration camp system run byNazi Germany in Europe during World War II, theGulag camps[19] run by theSoviet Union,[20] and the forced labour used by the military of theEmpire of Japan, especially during thePacific War (such as theBurma Railway). Roughly 4,000,000 German POWs were used as "reparations labour" by theAllies for several years after the German surrender; this was permitted under the Third Geneva Convention provided they were accorded proper treatment.[21] China'slaogai ("labour reform") system andNorth Korea'skwalliso camps are current examples.
About 12 million forced labourers, most of whom were Poles andSoviet citizens (Ost-Arbeiter) were employed in the German war economy inside Nazi Germany.[22][23] More than 2000 German companies profited from slave labour during the Nazi era, includingDaimler,Deutsche Bank,Siemens,Volkswagen,Hoechst,Dresdner Bank,Krupp,Allianz,BASF,Bayer,BMW, andDegussa.[24][25] In particular, Germany's Jewish population was subject to slave labour prior to their extermination.[26]
In Asia, according to a joint study of historians featuring Zhifen Ju,Mark Peattie, Toru Kubo, and Mitsuyoshi Himeta, more than 10 million Chinese were mobilised by the Japanese army andenslaved by theKōa-in forslave labour inManchukuo and north China.[27] The U.S. Library of Congress estimates that inJava, between 4 and 10 millionromusha (Japanese: "manual labourer") were forced to work by the Japanese military. About 270,000 of these Javanese labourers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia. Only 52,000 were repatriated to Java, meaning that there was a death rate of 80%.[28] Also, 6.87 million Koreans were forcefully put into slave labour from 1939 to 1945 in both Japan and Japanese-occupied Korea.[29]
Kerja rodi (Heerendiensten), was the term for forced labour inIndonesia underDutch colonial rule.
TheKhmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into aclassless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population ("New People") into agriculturalcommunes. The entire population was forced to become farmers inlabour camps.
Convict or prison labour is another classic form of unfree labour. The forced labour of convicts has often been regarded with lack of sympathy, because of thesocial stigma attached to people regarded as common criminals.
ThreeBritish colonies in Australia –New South Wales,Van Diemen's Land andWestern Australia – are examples of the state use of convict labour. Australia received thousands of convict labourers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were given sentences for crimes ranging from those now considered to be minor misdemeanours to such serious offences as murder, rape and incest. A considerable number of Irish convicts were sentenced to transportation fortreason while fighting againstBritish rule in Ireland.[citation needed]
More than 165,000 convicts were transported to Australian colonies from 1788 to 1868.[30] Most British or Irish convicts who were sentenced to transportation, however, completed their sentences in British jails and were not transported at all.
It is estimated that in the last 50 years more than 50 million people have been sent to Chineselaogai camps.[31]
A more common form in modern society is indenture, orbonded labour, under which workers sign contracts to work for a specific period of time, for which they are paid only with accommodation and sustenance, or these essentials in addition to limited benefits such as cancellation of a debt, or transportation to a desired country.
While historically unfree labour was frequently sanctioned by law, in the present day most unfree labour now revolves around illegal control rather than legal ownership, as all countries have made slavery illegal.[32]
As mentioned above, there are several exceptions of unfree or forced labour recognised by theInternational Labour Organization:
Some countries practise forms of civil conscription for different major occupational groups or inhabitants under different denominations likecivil conscription,civil mobilization,political mobilisation etc. This obligatory service on the one hand has been implemented due to long-lastinglabour strikes, during wartime or economic crisis, to provide basic services like medical care, food supply or supply of the defence industry. On the other hand, this service can be obligatory to provide recurring and inevitable services to the population, like fire services, due to lack of volunteers.
Between December 1943 and March 1948 young men in theUnited Kingdom, the so-calledBevin Boys, had been conscripted for the work incoal mines.[33] InBelgium in 1964,[34] inPortugal[35] and inGreece from 2010 to 2014 due to the severeeconomic crisis,[36][37] a system of civil mobilisation was implemented to provide public services as a national interest.
InSwitzerland in most communities for all inhabitants, no matter if they are Swiss or not, it is mandatory to join the so-calledMilitia Fire Brigades, as well as the obligatory service in Swiss civil defence and protection force.Conscripts inSingapore are providing the personnel of the country's fire service as part of thenational service in theCivil Defence Force. InAustria andGermany citizens have to join acompulsory fire brigade if avolunteer fire service can not be provided, due to lack of volunteers. In 2018 this regulation is executed only in a handful of communities in Germany and currently none in Austria.[38][39][40]
Beside the conscription formilitary services, some countries draft citizens forparamilitary orsecurity forces, likeinternal troops,border guards orpolice forces. While sometimes paid, conscripts are not free to decline enlistment.Draft dodging ordesertion are often met with severe punishment. Even in countries which prohibit other forms of unfree labour, conscription is generally justified as being necessary in thenational interest and therefore is one of the five exceptions to theForced Labour Convention, signed by the most countries in the world.[41]
Community service is a non-paying job performed by one person or a group of people for the benefit of their community or its institutions. Community service is distinct from volunteering, since it is not always performed on a voluntary basis. Although personal benefits may be realised, it may be performed for a variety of reasons including citizenship requirements, a substitution of criminal justice sanctions, requirements of a school or class, and requisites for the receipt of certain benefits.
During theCold War in somecommunist countries likeCzechoslovakia, theGerman Democratic Republic or theSoviet Union the originally voluntary work on Saturday for the community calledSubbotnik,Voskresnik orAkce Z becamede facto obligatory for the members of a community.
In someAustrian andGerman states it is feasible for communities to draft citizens for public services, calledhand and hitch-up services. This mandatory service is still executed to maintain the infrastructure of small communities.[42][43]
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