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During the last ten years, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and some other international organizations, have increasingly addressed human trafficking from a “forced labour” perspective. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the terminology in relation to human trafficking and forced labour, to highlight the links between them, and to provide a critique of the ILO approach. It also aims to make the case for the implementation of a specific international instrument to address the link between trafficking and forced labour.

This paper compares the definitions of human trafficking and forced labour, the link between them in the United Nations, European and ILO instruments.

Although human trafficking is a criminal activity, the ILO identifies it as a form of forced labour. The paper concludes that, no matter what role the trafficking victims have in participating in the criminal activities, they should be viewed as victims and witnesses. They should not be viewed as “workers” or “labourers”. Any minor under the age of 18 years, in accordance with the European and international instruments, has no legal capacity to give consent to being exploited.

This paper argues that the international and European instruments do not specifically address the link between trafficking and forced labour. There is a need for a specific international instrument prescribing the link between trafficking and forced labour. In the absence of such an international instrument, there is a piece meal approach by international bodies and countries toward the regulation of trafficking and forced labour.

This paper proposes a holistic institutional approach to provide insight into the policy reforms necessary to progressively achieve compliance with internationally recognized labor-related human rights. Drawing on institutions theory from political economy, the paper reframes international legal norms as holistic institutions, comprised of rules, social norms, and actual behaviors, the so-called rules of the game. In this way, problems in implementing labor-related human rights that may result in violations of international law are also considered as employment practices and, like other employment practices, are embedded in a web of formal and informal rules – institutions that govern work and employment. Based on the understanding that institutions contribute to violations, this holistic institutional approach also includes a framework to improve regulation and compliance based on Harold Koh's compliance theory from international law. The approach is illustrated using the example of forced obligatory overtime in textile assembly (maquilas) in Honduras and Nicaragua.

This chapter is about child labour as slavery in modern and modernizing societies in an era of rapid globalization.

For the most part, child slavery in modern societies is hidden from view and cloaked in social customs, this being convenient for economic exploitation purposes.

The aim of this chapter is to bring children's ‘modern slavery’ out of the shadows, and thereby to help clarify and shape relevant social discourse and theory, social policies and practices, slavery-related legislation and instruments at all levels, and above all children's everyday lives, relationships and experiences.

The main focus is on issues surrounding (i) the concept of ‘slavery’; (ii) the types of slavery in the world today; (iii) and ‘child labour’ as a type, or basis, of slavery.

There is an in-depth examination of the implications of the notion of ‘slavery’ within international law for child labour, and especially that performed through schooling.

According to one influential approach, ‘slavery’ is a state marked by the loss of free will where a person is forced through violence or the threat of violence to give up the ability to sell freely his or her own labour power. If so, then hundreds of millions of children in modern and modernizing societies qualify as slaves by virtue of the labour they are forced – compulsorily and statutorily required – to perform within schools, whereby they, their labour and their labour power are controlled and exploited for economic purposes.

Under globalization, such enslavement has almost reached global saturation point.

Forced labour is one of the most exploitative practices in supply chains, generating serious human right abuses. The authors seek to understand how relationships for reducing forced labour are influenced by institutional logics. The emerging supply chain efforts of social enterprises offer particularly intriguing approaches, as their social mission can spur creative new approaches and reshape widely adopted management practices.

The authors study supplier relationships in the smartphone industry and compare the evolving practices of two cases: the first, a growing novel social enterprise; and the second, a high-profile commercial firm that has adopted a progressive role in combating forced labour.

The underlying institutional logic influenced each firm's willingness to act beyond its direct suppliers and to collaborate in flexible ways that create systematic change. Moreover, while both focal firms had clear, well-documented procedures related to forced labour, the integration, rather than decoupling, of forced labour and general supply chain policies provided a more effective way to reduce the risks of forced labour in social enterprises.

As authors’ comparative case study approach may lack generalizability, future research is needed to broadly test their propositions.

The paper identifies preconditions in terms of institutional logics to successfully reduce the risk of forced labour in supply chains.

This paper discusses how social enterprises can provide a learning laboratory that enables commercial firms to identify options for supplier relationship improvement.

Antecedents The development of labour supply over the next fifteen years has its roots firmly implanted in the past. This dynamic characteristic of labour supply changes extends to labour force participation rates as well as to changes in labour supply attributable to purely demographic changes, so we shall initially examine both of these components of labour force change over the post‐war period. Changes in the size of the labour force which would occur as a result of changes in the age/sex structure of the population and the propensity of women to many if age/sex/marital status‐specific labour force participation rates were constant is denoted as demographic, and Table I shows its contribution to labour force growth in the post‐war period. The primary force behind the demographically‐induced change in the male labour supply is earlier movements in fertility, but both past fertility and contemporary marriage behaviour affect the magnitude of the demographically‐induced change in the female labour supply. In particular, up to the early 1970s the increase in the proportion of women under the age of 70 who are married restrained labour force growth because of the generally higher labour force participation rates of unmarried women; the size of this negative impact did, however, decline over time.

Perhaps no other topic was given so much attention in the Kuwaiti socio‐political, economic literature as that of human resources. This is so for a number of reasons. First, Kuwait being a small economy cannot survive on its own labor force. Foreign labor helps the country but has some serious consequences. The imported labor force is very cheap compared to national labor. This had resulted in a malallocation of manpower in various sectors of the economy. Secondly, Kuwait, like many Muslim Gulf societies, does not fully utilize its female labor force; and thirdly, there are problems regarding the attitudes of Kuwaitis towards labor of particular types. In addition, there are many challenges in the area of human resources that the country faces as it moves into the 21st century.

At present, China’s forestry development is mainly driven by the traditional production factors such as forestry labor force, land resources and capital and thus the top priority of forestry development is to optimize forestry production factors. Scientific and effective forestry labor input has a significant role in promoting the development of forestry industry. Given that the actual input to forestry labor is not clear, the accuracy of the forestry industry development may be slightly affected. Based on the monitoring project of collective forest tenure reform (RCFT), this paper uses the survey data of 3,500 rural households in seven provinces of China from 2010 to 2014 and 2016 to 2017 to measure the actual labor force in China, and empirically analyzes and studies the factors influencing the development of forestry industry based on the provincial data of forestry in China, and further discusses the heterogeneous impact of forestry production factors on the development of forestry industry.

In this paper, the generalized least squares estimation model is used to calculate the actual number of forestry labor in China, and then the Cobb–Douglas production function is selected to explore the influencing factors of forestry industry development.

The results show that the actual number of forestry labor force in China continues to decline and the degree of reduction varies from different regions. The forestry labor is a major factor that promotes the development of the forestry industry, but this promotion is affected by the low matching degree between the forestry production factors and thus further inhibits the development of the forestry industry. Due to the time lag of the reform, the implementation of RCFT first weakens and then promotes the development of forestry production. Further on, the forestry labor input is heterogeneous in land resource endowment, forestry investment source and the proportion of management personnel.

Therefore, researches show that the feasible way to promote the development of forestry industry is to expand the scale of forestry labor force, optimize the mutual allocation of forestry production factors, enhance the input of human capital in forestry and deepen the RCFT.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the labour force participation among the elderly population (aged 60 and above) in India from data available for the most recent time periods. The paper reviews the types of employment, industries and occupations that the elderly in India are employed in presently and also examines the impact of different factors on the decision of the elderly to be a part of the labour force.

Unit-level data has been extracted from the most recent data available on employment and labour force in India provided by the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), from 2017 to 2018 to 2019–2020. Binary logistic regression model has been used to identify some of the socio-economic and demographic factors that influence the odds of the elderly being a part of the labour force along with the extent of their influence, and Wald statistic has been used to examine the dynamics.

The study finds that among the elderly population, males, individuals living in rural areas, those living alone, those who are currently married and those with low educational attainment are more likely to be a part of the labour force. Again, elderly females are found to be employed mostly in the informal or unorganised sector which provide minimal or nil social security benefits. Between 2017–2018 and 2019–2020, the coefficients for sector, gender, marital status, education and income are found to be significantly different.

This paper attempts to shed some light on the scanty literature with regards to studies on the elderly in India, and also to reveal the possible factors which induce the elderly in India to participate in the labour force with the help of the most recent data available.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-06-2021-0350.

This paper aimed examining the contribution of female labour force participation rate on economic growth in the sub-Saharan Africa during the period of 1991–2019.

The study employed a sample of 42 sub-Sahara African countries using annual data from the World Bank development indicators. The long-run causal effect of female labour force and economic growth was analysed using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model and Granger causality test for causality and direction since the variables did not have the same order of integration.

The estimated results indicate that a long-run causal relationship exists between female labour force and economic growth in sub-Sahara Africa and the direction of causality is unidirectional running from economic growth to female labour force. The results also showed that female labour force participation rate negatively and significantly contributes to economic growth (GDP) is sub-Saharan Africa in the long run with an insignificantly negative contribution in the short run hence a liability.

The author recommends the promotion of women's economic empowerment to encourage female labour force participation to increase economic growth in the entire sub-Saharan region.

This paper adds to existing literature by using more comprehensive and up to econometric analysis and variables. This paper also makes further recommendation on how female labour force participation can boost economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

This paper adds to existing literature by using more comprehensive and up to econometric analysis and variables. This paper also makes further recommendation on how female labour force participation can boost economic growth in SSA.

To investigate the extent to which disability discourages an individual from going on the job market, using data from an Italian survey.

We use an extended definition of labour force participation based on being employed or currently seeking work even if the persons declare themselves as housewives, students, retired or in any other condition otherwise. We use probit, sequential and multinomial logit models for analysing labour force participation and outcomes. We distinguish between the impact of disability in its strict sense and chronic illness explaining the difference.

In all variants we find that chronic illness is a stronger deterrent for labour force participation than disability. Women are more discouraged compared to men. Intellectual disability is the strongest barrier and hearing the least influential. In a sequential decision-making process, we find that disability affects both labour force participation decision and the ability to be employed but not so much the choice between part-time and full-time.

Policies providing tailored solutions for improved access to education and health care for disabled persons will enhance their work opportunities.

Data set is cross-sectional and characterised by attrition. It would be interesting to compare results with a longitudinal and more representative data set.

We have a unique data set from a survey which was specifically targeted at people who were identified as disabled in a previous survey. The Italian context is also special due to its high legal employment quotas and noncompliance sanctions.