Once, fighting exploitation meant better wages, stronger unions, and safer workplaces. Today, it means police raids, satellite imagery, and border control. “Modern slavery”, often used interchangeably with “trafficking”, has become a political spectacle, dramatic enough to stir emotions, vague enough to serve power.
Labour interventions have long shaped our understanding of work and exploitation. Since its founding in 1919, the International Labour Organization has developed a framework of international labour standards aimed at promoting decent work and social justice, despite resistance from wealthy industrial nations. Early conventions laid the groundwork for regulating working time and child labour. [1] Over the decades, landmark instruments and national legislation expanded the language of rights, ensuring protections around collective bargaining, non-discrimination, and fair wages.[2]
By the late 1990s, a wave of anti-trafficking and anti-slavery campaigns began to reshape how we talk about exploitation at work. Workers’ rights, better wages, and social protection gave way to moral theatre. The spotlight shifted from structural reform to simplistic narratives of heroic Non-Government Organisations and government agencies rescuing victims and punishing villains. Police raids on bars and brothels, massage parlours, garment factories, and nail salons continue to grab headlines across the world, including in our research sites in Leicester, Delhi and Manila. But our research shows that these interventions rarely change the lives of workers and may even deepen their precarity, while leaving intact the structural vulnerabilities produced by poverty, weak labour laws, and restrictive migration regimes.
Take the 2020 Boohoo scandal in Leicester. Allegations of modern slavery prompted state raids and factory closures. Brands distanced themselves, and Boohoo shifted production elsewhere. The workers—mostly South Asian—were left behind. Many turned to gig work or other low-paid jobs. Women lost the kinship networks that had formed around garment work. What, then, did the antislavery intervention actually achieve? It did not lead to better wages, stronger enforcement, or mechanisms for worker voice. In Delhi, too, workers “rescued” from brick kilns or domestic labour often returned to the same jobs. Legal cases dragged on for years, and workers simply could not afford to wait. In Manila, women sex workers “rescued” from bars and brothels by Western NGOs often returned to sex work because the alternatives available—such as domestic work or factory work—were even more labour-intensive, insecure, inflexible, and poorly paid.
Where is the agenda heading?
More recently, the language of “modern slavery” has been stretched far beyond the original focus on exploitative labour practices. It is now regularly invoked in relation to a wide array of issues – from war and migration to climate displacement and digital surveillance. But what does this expansion actually achieve? When slavery becomes a metaphor for everything, does the term retain any meaning at all?
In Ukraine, trafficking reports surged after the invasion, but this framing often obscured the informal economies that displaced people entered. A similar dynamic is emerging around climate migration – one of the most regressive turns in the modern slavery agenda. In Bangladesh, over 90% of migrants from climate-affected regions such as Sylhet and Pirojpur report experiencing wage withholding, debt bondage, restricted movement, and physical abuse. Many are pushed into internal migration or sent abroad to Gulf countries, where they end up in exploitative labour conditions in construction, agriculture, or domestic work. Yet rather than building safe migration pathways and stronger labour protections, policymakers often frame these migrants as trafficking victims, subjecting them to surveillance, crackdowns, and immigration restrictions in the name of “protection”, while failing to address the structural drivers of exploitation. If climate migration is inevitable, the real question is why we are still failing to build systems that ensure dignity, safety, and rights for those on the move.
Further, authoritarian regimes have weaponised anti-slavery rhetoric to justify exclusion, surveillance, and crackdowns on migrants, yet exploitative conditions are maintained: In Saudi Arabia, the Kafala system continues to give employers near-total control over migrant workers’ legal status, movement, and employment. Despite reforms, workers, especially from Ethiopia, Nepal, and India, face wage theft, passport confiscation, and forced labour on mega-projects like NEOM, a high-tech, carbon-neutral mega-city, envisioned as a showcase for futuristic urban design and economic diversification, where over 21,000 migrant workers have died since construction began. Meanwhile, in the UK, the government is not revising its Modern Slavery Act 2015 to strengthen worker protection but to restrict asylum seekers’ access to it. The Border Security, Asylum & Immigration Bill (2025) retains provisions disqualifying trafficking claims and detaining child asylum seekers. In September 2025, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced further reforms narrowing protections, following court rulings that had blocked deportations of people who claimed trafficking status. Theresa May chairs the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, despite significantly rolling back protections for migrant domestic workers in the UK as Home Secretary.
Meanwhile, tech companies market AI dashboards, apps, blockchain audits, and satellite imagery as tools to detect slavery in supply chains from cocoa to cobalt. Projects like Slavery from Space and Exiger’s AI platform promise visibility of slavery, deflecting attention from the low-wage, informal labour that underpins global production. Apps targeted at due diligence or worker voice have already been critiqued for problematic methodologies, wrongful prosecution and concerns around vulnerable workers’ data misuse without improving their structural conditions. Meanwhile, resources are shrinking. In 2024–25 alone, the US Department of Labour’s Bureau of International Labour Affairs cut over US$500 million in grants for labour standard enforcement affecting critical programmes on preventing child labour, forced labour and human trafficking in 40 countries across Mexico, Central America, Southeast Asia, and Africa, leaving even less money for structural improvements.
But with all these diverse phenomena being folded into the vocabulary of slavery and trafficking, what does it mean when “slavery” becomes a catch-all metaphor for injustice? Does its rhetorical expansion heighten political urgency or dilute its capacity to address the everyday conditions of workers? If slavery is everywhere, in war, in tech, in space, in supply chains, is it also nowhere in particular?
Returning to the basics.
Once, labour rights meant something tangible: fair wages, safe working conditions, and the power to organise. Today, the modern slavery agenda has traded those foundations for theatrics. It no longer asks how exploitation is produced; it asks who can be saved, and how loudly. Structural concerns like welfare, enforcement, and worker voice are sidelined in favour of border raids, supply chain audits, and algorithmic dashboards.
Given this trajectory, it is unsurprising that “modern slavery” discourse has been easily folded into right-wing populist agendas. Instead of advancing justice, it now underwrites detention centres, deportation flights, and empty corporate compliance rituals. The result is a future where migrants are criminalised in the name of protection, tech firms sell “freedom” through satellite imagery, and governments cut funding for labour rights while expanding surveillance.
There is an urgent need for course correction that recentres more radical, even if less glamorous, objectives: fair wages, strong and comprehensive social services, and dignified work. These don’t make headlines. They don’t fit into glossy CSR reports or triumphant rescue narratives, but they are the best way to prevent exploitation.
Pankhuri Agarwal is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Bath and King’s College London. Her work can be found here.
Dr Sharmila Parmanand is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Development and Globalisation at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
[1] Such as the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919 (No. 1) and the Minimum Age Convention, 1919 (No. 5).
[2] For example, the Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29), Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87), and the Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100)
Image credit: Jon Tyson via Unsplash