Labor trafficking relies on “force, fraud, or coercion” to compel someone to perform a specific service, task, or job (NHTH). Contemporarily understood as a “form of modern-day slavery,” labor trafficking deceptively or explicitly violates labor regulations, as employers often control “an employee’s living conditions and movement to and from work” (Owens et al. 2015). Labor trafficking is not just individual instances of exploitation, but racial and globalized networks encouraged by free-market practices of outsourcing cheap labor—ultimately making entire labor forces invisible and immobile.

Cycles and conditions of labor exploitation make people more vulnerable to trafficking; hence the sliding scale. Scholars on labor abuses assert that there is a “very fine line between deception, socialization, and normalization” of disliked labor tasks (Molland 2012) that may subversively transform labor exploitation into labor trafficking. For example, “some [migrants] do not fully comprehend the terms of their agreement with a facilitator, the specific working conditions or risks in a new locale, or how difficult it can be to pay off a debt. In some scenarios, one’s initial consent or knowledge about the kind of work he or she will be doing is diluted by subsequent, unexpected demands or conditions” (Weitzer 2014).

Labor exploitation and trafficking are entangled within a spectrum of worker vulnerabilities and oppressive workplace conditions.  

It is important to note that human trafficking data accuracy is obscured by access to reporting, bias in detection operations, and other complications, like immigration status (SPLC 2013).

In labor trafficking networks, reporting is mishandled precisely because of an employer’s profitable restriction of workers’ rights. This is a larger reinforcement of the clandestine and obscured nature of labor trafficking networks that this website seeks to reveal. 

We should take note from the Transnational Alliance to Combat Illicit Trade: “Although the US Trafficking in Persons Report has emerged as an extremely valuable tool, its reliance on law enforcement data collected on the number of prosecutions, convictions and victims identified runs the risk to overlook the vast number of trafficking or forced labor cases that may never be reported” (TRACIT 2021). 

POTENTIAL PROs & CONs: If the Threshold for Identifying Labor Trafficking were Expanded Globally