Financiers
in Wall Street, the City of London and other banking centres should
play a bigger role in freeing the millions of people who endure
slave-like working conditions globally, according to a 172-page
report, Unlocking
Potential: A Blueprint for Mobilising Finance Against Slavery and
Trafficking,
.The report paints a bleak portrait of modern slavery, which sees one
in every 185 people globally forced to work in an illicit sector that
compares in scale to the trade in illegal drugs and counterfeit
goods.
A
group of experts known as the Financial Sector Commission on Modern
Slavery and Human Trafficking say that banks and other finance bodies
can adopt policies to reduce the 40.3 million men, women and children
who are victims of forced labour. Modern forms of slavery include
debt bondage, where workers are forced to toil for free in service of
a debt, forced marriage, domestic servitude, and forced labour, in
which workers face violence or intimidation.
Modern-day
slaves can be found doing everything from begging to gold-mining, but
the biggest sectors in the 150-billion-dollar-a-year global business
are housework, manufacturing and construction. A quarter of those
involved are children. Getting
the number of exploited workers down to zero by 2030 will involve
releasing 10,000 victims of modern slavery every day for the next 11
years.
“Slavery
and human trafficking are big business, reckoned to generate 150
billion dollars every year over the broken backs, hearts and dreams
of people young and old,” said Dutch foreign minister Stef
Blok, who was involved in the report.
James
Cockayne, a co-author of the report and policy analyst at United
Nations University, said human trafficking and slavery represented a
“tragic market failure” .
“Modern
slavery leaves us all worse off because it treats people as
disposable objects rather than full economic and social agents,”
said Cockayne. “We
collectively lose out on a huge amount of potential that is currently
locked up.
Financial
institutions can help to achieve that target by boosting resources
for financial probes into people-trafficking rings and lifting the
lid on firms that turn a profit through slavery, according to the
report’s authors. Banks can get better at spotting the
illicit cash flows linked to people-smuggling rings, and can
cooperate more with other institutions to identify and combat the
abuse of some of the world’s most vulnerable people. As
well as turning people into slaves, trafficking ringleaders have also
been known to hijack the financial identities of their victims for
money laundering purposes.
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