A contemporary anti-slavery movement has emerged in response to the diverse array of forms of forced labour that proliferate in the twenty-first-century global economy. The movement has encouraged survivors to speak out about their experiences of enslavement and to work as activists in a new abolitionist cause. As a result, the genre of the slave narrative, so popular among nineteenth-century abolitionists, has reemerged as a form of protest literature. This article suggests that by documenting the very fact of enslavement in the 21st century, the new slave narrators collectively reveal the widespread failure of the promises of globalisation, even as they celebrate their emergence into it. Through these narratives, we are able to discern the true contours of globalisation, the radical inequalities that remain and are fed by the transnational flow of commodities, including but not exclusively labour, and the slavery that is endemic and even encouraged in these global transactions.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the more common human rights violations with corporate involvement. The non-exhaustive overview aims to provide some initial insights into how corporate conduct can affect and impact human rights and to show the breadth of issues that fall under a BHR lens. Hence, the focus is on problems rather than solutions. The issues and violations dealt with are selected with a view on multinational corporations in particular. Furthermore, the selected issues are cross-cutting – that is, not specific to one particular industry. The chapter covers human rights problems relating to employment relations, corporate supply chains, affected communities, the environment, and particularly vulnerable groups such as Indigenous peoples or human rights defenders. Violations include discrimination, child labor, forced labor and modern slavery, and land grabbing, among others.

The book begins with a reference to a chilling ad placed in the local newspaper by a couple in Brazil looking to “adopt” a girl” to provide unpaid domestic labor. The author exposes how the rhetoric of family is used to facilitate labor exploitation of children and establishes the normalization of this practice in contemporary Brazil. Moving from the “circulation of children” to the exploitation of adult filhas de criação, Hordge-Freeman explains how racial, gender, and class domination shape the historical backdrop for the emergence of exploitative work–family relationships. Grounding this work, she introduces the theoretical concept of “affective captivity” as a framework that allows her to elaborate on the structural and affective factors involved with exploitative forms of informal adoption (criação). She notes the distinctiveness of her methodology, which includes longitudinal interviews (conducted over ten years) and the unique perspective of ethnographic observations of her live-in experiences with filhas de criação. Hordge-Freeman emphasizes the importance of an intersectional approach to contextualize the ambiguities between work and family in a way that leads to the enduring nature of these exploitative relationships.

In the concluding chapter, the author reiterates how the hyper-exploitation of filhas de criação is sustained by an affective architecture of domination that interlocks morality and family to produce affective captivity. Zooming out from informal adoption, she highlights the role of consciousness-raising and leveraging transnational connections in order to eradicate labor exploitation. She also explores the relevance of this work for a more robust racial and gender analysis of human trafficking and labor exploitation around the world. In doing so, the author critiques the tendency to criminalize all informal family arrangements and, instead, promotes alternative approaches that are culturally relevant and realistic for Brazil’s uncertain future. There are glimmers of hope that emerge from the individual journeys of the women in this study. However, the more significant finding is that the level of structural violence that they experience, paired with their affective captivity in their oppressors’ lives, offers a chilling commentary that the most powerful weapon used in the service of domination can be love.

The prohibition of slavery is not only a customary rule of international law, it is also an international crime and a norm of jus cogens. Slavery has been famously described as ‘social death’, but this chapter considers whether, and in which circumstances, it may also constitute a violation of the right to life.

This chapter analyses the growing use of ethical certification schemes as a strategy to fight forced labor in the contemporary global economy. It draws on a large primary dataset from the Global Business of Forced Labour study, collected from 2016–2018, which sheds light into the business models of forced labor in the cocoa and tea industries as well as the effectiveness of ethical certification in combatting forced labor. Drawing on data that demonstrates that ethical certification schemes are failing to create worksites that are free from exploitation, I argue that ethical certification labelling is misleading consumers about the labor conditions involved in the goods they are buying. I explore the contradictions of selling "ethical" products that give the impression that goods have been made through labor standards that they are known to fall short of. I explore the challenge of modernizing historically successful strategies to combat slavery made-goods for use in the present.

Over the last two decades, fighting modern slavery and human trafficking have become a cause célèbre. Yet, large numbers of researchers, nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, workers, and others who would seem like natural allies of the fight against modern slavery and trafficking are hugely skeptical of these movements. They object to anti-slavery and anti-trafficking framings of the problems, and are skeptical of the "new abolitionist" movement. Why? In this Introduction, we explain how our edited book tackles key controversies surrounding the anti-slavery and anti-trafficking movements and scholarship head-on. We have assembled champions and sceptics of anti-slavery to explore the fissures and fault-lines that surround efforts to fight modern slavery and human trafficking today. These include: whether efforts to fight modern slavery displace or crowd out support for labor and migrant rights; whether and to what extent efforts to fight modern slavery mask, naturalize, and distract from racial, gendered, and economic inequality; and whether contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking crusaders’ use of history are accurate and appropriate.

Historians, like contemporary activists, use numbers to make moral claims: the greater the number of victims, the greater the moral value of a given phenomenon. But rarely do historians or contemporary activists reflect on how they use numbers or historicize the complex ways numbers have clarified or conversely obscured ethical claims about stopping slavery. In “Counting Modern Slaves,” I examine the particular political work that counting slaves has historically accomplished. I begin with the first British actors to make counting slaves profitable, the metropolitan architects of the planet’s first global marketplace, one in raced slaves. I then consider how abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic flipped that calculating script by brilliantly deploying metrics to hammer home key arguments about the universal values in slavery’s demise. Contemporary abolitionists, in turn, have eschewed the racism of the quantifying architects of the slave trade, but use numbers to aggregate modern slaves without clarifying the ethical choices that shape their calculations. In “Counting Modern Slaves,” I do not condemn using numbers, but rather seek to clarify how, when, and why counting slaves has accomplished its emancipatory possibility.

This chapter takes up the challenge to see the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as integrated and indivisible, and does so through the lens of slavery survivors’ own accounts. It draws from a major new collection of contemporary survivor narratives to answer a key question: which SDG target achievements are more likely to prevent or end enslavement? Focusing on India and on forced marriage as a case study, it looks beyond the SDG targets on forced labor (8.7) and forced marriage (5.3) themselves to identify three main SDG target issues as drivers of enslavement: 1.2 (poverty), 4.5 (gender disparities in education), and 5.1 (discrimination against women). Survivors also highlight the multi-directional relationships between these target issues that led to their exploitation. As an approach, this multi-SDG coding of narratives suggests that survivors’ own voices could be more central to the global antislavery and development agendas. In the detail of individuals’ unique lived experiences, we can identify the interrelated causal factors for vulnerability, and better enable the global antislavery community to tackle the socio-economic, cultural, and political drivers for slavery that are embodied in a range of SDG target combinations.

The chapter examines the evolution over the past twenty years of a complex transnational legal order or TLO around the 2000 Palermo Protocol on Trafficking. It elaborates on why despite the Protocol’s high rates of ratification, the anti-trafficking TLO is poorly institutionalized attributing it to the various phases of the TLO’s development, the discursive and ideological issues that are at its core, the factors for its institutionalization relating to concordance and issue alignment, and the varied regulatory fields that it has implicated. Paradoxically however, the criminal justice approach to trafficking inherent in the Palermo Protocol remains hegemonic. This hegemony however cannot be simply attributed to the unidirectional influence and dissemination of transnational (and Western) ideas about how to address the problem. Rather, using the example of the India, the chapter shows how national legal contexts are crucial to when and how the logic of criminalization is pursued. The recursive nature of the trafficking TLO is therefore significant and helps explain the normative basis for the authority of transnational law.

Chapter 7 focuses on justice for temporary labor migrants. Though the chapter surveys many normative issues concerning temporary labor migration, the focus is on new sources of concern, such as those introduced by private recruitment companies, which are often guilty of serious deception, fraud, abuse, and failures to protect migrants, while destination and home countries fail to take responsibility for oversight. Labor migration is often characterized as beneficial to the migrants, along with both sending and receiving countries. While the logic of mutual advantage has a place in considering labor migration justice, especially considering the scale of global unemployment, there should be important constraints on such programs. These include requirements to ensure robust measures are in place that can offer reasonable human rights protections for migrant workers. The chapter discusses which rights deserve protection. There is scope for migrants to trade off protection of certain rights in exchange for labor market access, if they so choose. The chapter also offers principles to navigate which rights are “tradable” and which deserve rigorous protection.

Traditionally, corporate governance debates have contrasted models based on the principle of shareholder primacy with others taking into account the interests of other stakeholders, such as organised labour. This chapter argues that a new corporate governance compromise is emerging, particularly in Europe, driven by responsible investors, civil society and organised labour, which might offer a new way of overcoming the shareholder versus stakeholder dispute. This emerging NGOs-Investor-Union nexus is illustrated using various examples of recent regulatory initiatives: the EU Non-financial Reporting Directive; the Dutch Banking Sector Agreement regarding human rights; the UK Modern Slavery Act and the French Law on the ‘duty of vigilance’. The chapter draws on the abovementioned cases to elaborate some conjectures on the implications and limitations of this dynamic and fragile convergence of interests for policy-makers and existing debates on sustainable corporate governance reforms.