Modern Slavery, Unfree Labour and the Labour Market: The Social Dynamics of Legal Characterization

Treating the United Kingdom’s Modern Slavery Act as its focus, this article examines what the legal characterization of labour unfreedom reveals about the underlying conception of the labour market that informs contemporary approaches to labour law in the United Kingdom. It discusses how unfree labour is conceptualized within two key literatures – Marxist-inspired political economy and liberal approaches to modern slavery – and their underlying assumptions of the labour market and how it operates. As an alternative to these depictions of the labour market, it proposes a legal institutionalist or constitutive account. It develops an approach to legal characterization and jurisdiction that is attentive to modes of governing and the role of political and legal differentiation both in producing labour exploitation and unfree labour and in developing strategies for its elimination. It argues that the problem with the modern slavery approach to unfree labour is that it tends to displace labour law as the principal remedy to the problem of labour abuse and exploitation, while simultaneously reinforcing the idea that flexible labour markets of the type that prevails in the United Kingdom are realms of labour freedom

Causes of child labour: Perceptions of rural and urban parents in Ghana

The study focuses on parental perceptions of causes of child labour in rural and urban areas of Ghana. The research is grounded on qualitative research techniques by specifically utilising in-depth interviews, focus groups, and participant observation to collect the necessary data for the study. In this approach, the data gathering happened in Phases 1 and 2 of the research study at the research sites in rural areas, and urban areas. The 60 participants included government officials, representatives from NGOs, and both parents whose children were involved in child labour and parents whose children were not involved. Much theoretical and empirical evidence is presented to argue that child labour has a multiplicity of causes including cultural practices, socialisation, poverty, and lack of mechanisation of work. This paper finds that the socio-cultural contexts of child labour play a critical role in children's involvement in farming in the rural area while poverty also contributes to children's engagement in artisanal fishing work in the slum urban communities in Ghana. This paper recommends that child labour must be tackled in a coordinated manner on a cross-sectoral basis and there is the need to adopt policies that would address the category of work that falls within worst forms of child labour (WFCL). Additionally, policy-makers and NGOs must consider the link between economic deprivation and child labour when implementing programmes designed to combat the problem