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The issue of exploitative labour practices has been a persistent and recurring problem in the textile and garment industry. Despite increased media, policy and practitioners attention the evidence base remains unexplored. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has acknowledged the presence of labour exploitation in global supply chains because of private sectors’ employment practices. The purpose of this study is to apprehend views of multilevel stakeholders to explore the nature and driving mechanisms of exploitation.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 76 respondents from 25 factories from 3 cities of Pakistan i.e. Faisalabad, Lahore and Gujranwala. Convenient and snowball sampling techniques were used because of the complexity of research settings. Transcribed data was analysed with the help of NVivo.

Drawing on qualitative evidence, the study reveals that workers experience a range of exploitation at the workplace, which is unlikely to fall within the scope of severe exploitation. The findings reveal that three types of exploitation exist in Pakistan’s textile and garment industry such as financial, physiological and psychological. Power inequality is the foundation and a fundamental cause of the endurance of exploitation. The study found three mechanisms that facilitate the endurance of exploitation, i.e. distance, profit and oppression.

The study contributes to supply chain literature by exemplifying power inequality. It is crucial for the government to step up efforts to stipulate a minimum wage rate in the textile and garment industry to alleviate labour exploitation. The findings provide motivation for policy and decision-makers to implement incremental changes to global supply chains to protect the rights and welfare of workers, according to the standards of social accountability 8000, the ILO and other world trade stakeholders.

This study argues that the international and local instruments do not specifically address the severe labour exploitation in Pakistan textile and garment industry. Therefore, the need arises to develop a specific instrument to address the problem. In the absence of such an instrument, there is a piecemeal approach by international and local bodies towards the regulation of labour exploitation.

In contrast to the largely functionalist and apolitical literature which dominates organisational scholarship on exploitation and exploration after March, this paper seeks to complement this view of exploitation and exploration with a Marxist reading which is unwittingly implied by these terms. More specifically, we combine neo-Marxist and paleo-Marxist arguments to more fully understand the conflictual relations that underpin exploitation and exploration in the management of firms. This enables us to address both the objective and subjective dimensions of exploitation and exploration which firms and workers are involved in through the contemporary capitalist labour process. We illustrate this by drawing on a case study of a large Swedish manufacturing firm which sought to improve lean production by systematically helping employees to explore their own lifestyles and possibilities for a healthier and happier life.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the correlation between trafficking in children and child labour in Europe. The paper focuses on the scope of these issues and specific feature of child trafficking as the cause of the worst forms of child labour. Child labour and trafficking constitutes not only violations of children's rights, but also acts of transnational organised crime through which criminal groups acquire considerable amounts of money. The paper also identifies the shortcomings of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and European Union (EU) regulations.

Based on available statistical data, the paper seeks to identify the worst forms of child labour, in particular, the sexual exploitation of children as a consequence of child trafficking, and define the implications of child trafficking for the European Common Market.

The trafficking of children expressis verbis should be identified as a cause of the worst forms of child labour, in particular of sexual exploitation of children. Coherent activity of EU member state authorities, cooperation in the field of internal affairs and criminal matters, and development of effective supranational criminal law framework must become a priority of a society oriented towards the highest standards of protection of children's rights as a separate human rights category. The paper critically comments on the problems of relevant definitions contained in the ILO Convention No. 182.

The EU went the furthest with its activities; its supranational character proved to be much more effective in developing but also using the existing international instruments as compared to slow and passive child protection mechanisms within other international entities, ILO in particular.

Illustrates and explicates the proposition that the critique of exploitation and injustice found in contemporary Liberation Theology is theologically grounded, in that these phenomena are rebuked as discordant with God′s will, as revealed by textual re‐examination of the Bible, notably the Old Testament, not merely as socially undesirable, by examination of four central themes: (1) the Old Testament characterization of God as hater of exploitation, lover of justice, and Liberator of the oppressed; (2) the Biblical depiction of the character and methods of oppression and exploitation and the identification of oppressors and oppressed; (3) the Old Testament model of stages in the liberative process and vision of a future society characterized by peace, freedom, justice, equality, community, and prosperity; (4) significant elements of continuity between Old and New Testament on these issues.

Introduces a new approach to exploitation, and uses it to reinterpret the economic significance of racism, generally, and the underclass specifically. The extent of exploitation in labour processes is the product of two factors: whether workers have an “exit option” of ready alternative employment; and how completely labour exchanges specify the labour that will actually be done. The state of these two factors, in turn, depends on the social and historical setting of production. Uses this conception to reinterpret the effect of racism on economic outcomes – this suggests that the increasing number of permanently unemployed people in inner‐city ghettos have an important effect on the racially‐differentiated patterns of exploitation and on the overall level of exploitation in contrast with the perspective that the “underclass” is isolated from the rest of society.

This chapter argues that the Marxian theory of exploitation underlies the concepts of surplus and deficit industries that appear in Sraffa’s (1960) Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. This is seen from archival research of the unpublished papers of Piero Sraffa housed at the Wren Library, Trinity College, University of Cambridge. There it is shown that the origin of these concepts lies in the Marxian theory of exploitation that Sraffa developed regarding the notion of the ‘pool of profits’ the Italian economist utilized over a 14-year period from 1942 to 1956. The chapter engages in an extensive textual study of the archival evidence and then presents a simple analytical model of these relations.

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.

This paper discusses labor value and the rate of exploitation in the global economy using international input–output tables. Labor value is defined as the multiplication of the labor coefficient and Leontief inverse. Exploitation means that the amount of labor embodied in the received wage commodity is less than the amount of the labor actually sold. Therefore, the Fundamental Marxian Theorem, which states that the conditions for the existence of profit and those for the existence of exploitation are the same, should be modified to stipulate that the existence of profit requires exploitation in at least one country. In other words, exploitation may not exist in some countries (non-exploitation). In the context of international input–output tables, we introduce the concept of global labor value, which is the vector of embodied labor in various countries. In the empirical study using an international input–output table, we find that (1) there are non-exploitation cases in several countries. (2) During the time period 1995–2009, the rate of exploitation increased in Asian countries, namely China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, whereas the advanced countries other than Asia faced a decreased rate of exploitation.

The ‘hostile environment’ agenda of Government has effectively endorsed the deliberate exploitation of irregular migrants in the agricultural industry. This minor project of jurisprudence will provide two arguments in support of this hypothesis. Firstly, the vulnerabilities faced by irregular migrants are reinforced through the xenophobic narrative embodied within the law and the courts. The lack of priority afforded to modern slavery on the UK Policy Agenda has allowed a ‘grey labour market’ (1) to develop. Irregular migrants face a ‘precarity paradox’ and (2) they must avoid the carceral regime of immigration control by entering into unprotected and deliberately exploitative work. Secondly, a lacklustre attempt to remedy the corruption in the horticultural industry proves that the state is preoccupied, capitalising on irregular labour practice in the interests of state capital. Thus, the Government allows the commodification of workers within the supply chain to profit British businesses.

This chapter considers the impetus for the inclusion of labour rights and secure work rights, with a particular focus on countering human trafficking and what is now widely known as ‘modern slavery’ in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs comprise 17 goals and 169 targets set to assist nation states in achieving sustainable development in the ‘five P’ areas: People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnership. In this chapter we analyse goals and targets that focus on modern slavery and adult human trafficking (in particular sex trafficking and trafficking for forced labour), and review the SDGs in the context of existing international counter-trafficking and slavery mechanisms. We consider what this novel framework has to offer when it comes to addressing these forms of exploitation. In so doing, the chapter considers the likely impact of the SDGs to preventing and countering these exploitative practices, and its potential usefulness within the broader spectrum of counter-trafficking/slavery mechanisms. We suggest that the SDGs are yet another international instrument that makes strong rhetorical commitments to the intersections of labour, migration and exploitation, but lacks clarity and operational strength it needs to lead the path in reduction, if not elimination of such exploitative practices. Finally, we analyse the extent to which this instrument continues to ignore the factors that contribute to or sustain the conditions for exploitation, namely the impact of migration policies and the gendered nature of the issue.