Advocacy, Inc.: Ingos and Business Influence in the Movement Against "Modern Slavery

The contemporary movement to fight ＂modern slavery＂ has increasingly turned its attention to issues of forced labor, child labor and labor trafficking in a wide variety of industries and supply chains. At the same time, businesses have become more involved with the movement and their leadership has been touted as a better alternative to the assumed inferiority of civil society responses. How has business influence been playing out in the ＂anti-slavery＂ movement and what are the implications for international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) fighting these forms of labor exploitation? Based on interviews, online texts, documents, and media content from a variety of INGOs and other organizations in Europe and the United States fighting these problems, Advocacy, Inc. provides a cautionary case study. ＂Anti-slavery＂ advocacy has become a new market in which INGOs are pressed to become increasingly like for-profit businesses and the strategies they pursue do not adequately address the driving forces that have created conditions for continued labor exploitation in the global economy. Moreover, some businesses benefit from this scenario, having to do very little to claim ’hero’ status in advocacy efforts, while practices that perpetuate labor exploitation continue unabated.

Stephanie A. Limoncelli is Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University. She is the author of The Politics of Trafficking (Stanford, 2010).