Estimating forced labour: from a legal category to a statistical category for international political campaigns

ABSTRACT

This article contributes from a sociology of knowledge perspective to the ongoing sociological debate about statistics produced by international organisations taking the Global Estimates of Forced Labour published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as a case of international quantification. We ask: what stages of negotiation were involved in the transformation of a legal category into a statistical category of forced labour oriented towards political action? The analysis combines the historical reconstruction of the political and organisational processes behind the production of the estimates with the study of the measurement framework of forced labour. The qualitative case study is based on semi-structured expert interviews and ILO documents. Our results highlight the processes by which a legal category was made practicable for statistical work and thereby point to the specific arrangements and connections between law, statistics, and policy within international organisations. As we argue, the estimates have provided consistency to a fragile social construct that originated in the imperial context of the interwar period, and that was turned into a ‘visible’ social and global phenomenon of the twenty-first century.

KEYWORDS:

• Statistics
• categorisation
• International Labour Organization
• forced labour

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of the collective project ‘Forced Labour as a Shifting Global Category: Classification, Comparison and Meanings of Work in the International Labour Organization (ILO), 1919-2017’ (FU Berlin, PIs: Marianne Braig and Theresa Wobbe) and we would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for its generous funding (DFG Grant No. 413607635). The authors wish to thank Marianne Braig and Theresa Wobbe for their comments at various stages of the writing process, as well as Annick Lacroix, Baptiste Mollard and Laure Piguet for their critical perspective and thought-provoking suggestions. We are extremely grateful to our interviewees who took some of their precious time to answer our questions. Thanks also to Theresa Feißt, Mariana Pérez Garcia and Raffaela Pfaff for their valued advice and their work during the compilation of data and material, as well as to Kathrin Bennett for proofreading. Nicola Schalkowski wishes to thank the participants in the workshops of the network ‘Worlds of Related Coercions in Work’ for the interesting discussions (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, 23–27 May 2022).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For historical, anthropological and political economic accounts of forced or coerced labour, see LeBaron & Phillips, 2019; Phillips, 2013; Reckinger, 2018; Stanziani, 2020; Tiquet, 2019; Van Der Linden & Rodriguez Garcia, 2016.

2 According to Convention No. 182, Art. 3, the ‘worst forms of child labour’ comprise: ‘all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labour, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict’ (ILO, 1999c, Art. 3 (a)).

3 The ILO stated: ‘As the concepts of forced labour, human trafficking and slavery are closely related the ILO data initiative has been designed as a multi-stakeholder process involving all relevant organisations to agree on definitions for statistical purposes.’ (ILO, 2015a, p. 3).

4 Invited participants included actors from NGOs as well as governmental institutions with practical knowledge of conducting surveys or estimating forced labour and slavery at different levels (ILO, 2015b, p. 1).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicola Schalkowski

Nicola Schalkowski is a sociologist and PhD candidate at Freie Universität Berlin. She currently works as a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Latin American Studies in the DFG project ‘Forced Labour as a Shifting Global Category: Classification, Comparison and Meanings of Work in the International Labour Organization (ILO), 1919–2017’. Her research in the fields of sociology of knowledge, gender and feminist labour studies focuses on (un)paid domestic work and categorisations of work.

Léa Renard

Léa Renard is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology at Heidelberg University. Her research interests lie in the historical sociology of knowledge production, especially statistical categorization of work and migration.