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About the Authors:
Elena Ronda-Pérez
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliation: Public Health Department, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1886-466X
Bente E. Moen
Affiliation: Centre for International Health, Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, University of Bergen, Bergen, NorwayCitation: Ronda-Pérez E, Moen BE (2017) Labour trafficking: Challenges and opportunities from an occupational health perspective. PLoS Med 14(11): e1002440. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002440
Published: November 22, 2017
Copyright: © 2017 Ronda-Pérez, Moen. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Abbreviations: ILO, International Labour Organization; OHS, occupational health service
Provenance: Not commissioned; part of a Collection; externally peer reviewed.
Summary points
* Labour trafficking is intrinsically related to occupational health; however, very little attention has been paid to the issue from an occupational health perspective.
* The recognition of certain work-related health problems in workers in specific work sectors can help to identify victims of labour trafficking.
* This essay identifies a series of opportunities for occupational health services to detect and address labour trafficking and increase health personnel awareness of the problem.
Labour trafficking as a health issue
Labour trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery in which individuals are recruited or transported to perform labour or services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion and under the threat of some kind of penalty. In addition, the person has not offered himself/herself voluntarily for the activity in question. The International Labour Organization (ILO) uses the expression ‘forced labour’ instead of the word ‘trafficking’ and estimates that 25 million people are victims of forced labour [1]. This represents about 5.4 out of every 1,000 people globally. Approximately 90% are exploited by private individuals and enterprises. While in the past the ILO focused narrowly on sex trafficking, recently more attention has been paid to a broader range of sectors and circumstances in which forced labour may take place [2]. Global assessments suggest that a substantial proportion of labour migrants end up in situations of extreme exploitation, some of which are formally...