ILLEGAL profits from forced labour worldwide have soared to the “obscene” amount of $236 billion (£185bn) a year, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) reported today.

Sexual exploitation is to blame for three-quarters of the take from a business that deprives migrants of money to send home, deprives legal workers of jobs and allows the criminals behind it to evade taxes, the United Nations agency said.

The ILO said the tally for 2021, the most recent year covered by the painstaking international study, marked an increase of 37 per cent, or $64bn (£50bn), compared with its last estimate published a decade ago. 

The first line of the report’s introduction reads: “$236 billion. This is the obscene level of annual profit generated from forced labour in the world today.”

That figure represents earnings “effectively stolen from the pockets of workers” by those who coerce them to work, as well as money taken from migrants’ remittances and tax revenue lost by governments.

ILO director-general Gilbert Houngbo called for international co-operation to fight forced labour, saying that it “perpetuates cycles of poverty and exploitation and strikes at the heart of human dignity.

“We now know that the situation has only got worse,” he added.

According to the ILO, on any given day in 2021, an estimated 27.6 million people were in forced labour — a 10 per cent rise from five years earlier.

The Asia-Pacific region was home to more than half of the victims, while Africa, the Americas and Europe-central Asia each represented some 13-14 per cent.

About 6.3 million people faced situations of forced commercial sexual exploitation on any given day three years ago — and nearly four in five of them were girls or women, ILO said.

Children accounted for more than a quarter of the total cases.