ILO indicators of forced labour - 2025 revised edition

The revised 2025 edition of the ILO Indicators of Forced Labour provides frontline actors with practical tools to detect forced labour. Grounded in decades of research, it highlights the most common indicators and explains how to interpret them in real-world contexts. This concise guide can also support referral and formal indetification processes, prosecution and data collection.

Forced labour remains one of the most severe violations of human rights, affecting millions of people around the world. This booklet translates international standards into operational indicators to help practitioners identify potential victims and trigger further investigation. 

It outlines the most frequent signs of coercion and lack of consent, illustrated with real cases, and offers guidance on what to look for. Designed for labour inspectors, law enforcement, social workers, employers, and others who may encounter victims, these indicators are not exhaustive but serve as a flexible, evolving tool to support detection, referral, and data collection in the global fight against forced labour.

Combating forced labour - A handbook for employers and business

An ILO-IOE practical handbook to help companies and employer organizations prevent and address risks of forced labour. Grounded on international labour standards, it offers practical tools for due diligence based on the 11 indicators of forced labour.

Forced labour affects more than 27 million people worldwide, cutting across borders, sectors, and supply chains. Companies and employer organizations have a vital role to play in eradicating this pervasive abuse.

The ILO and IOE published the first edition of Combating Forced Labour: A Handbook for Employers and Business in 2008, followed by a second edition in 2015. This third edition provides updated, practical guidance to help companies identify, prevent, and mitigate risks of forced labour within their operations and supply chains.

It is grounded in international labour standards, including the ILO Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29) and its 2014 Protocol, as well as internationally recognized frameworks on business and human rights: the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the ILO Tripartite Declaration of Principles concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy (MNE Declaration).

The handbook uses the ILO definition of forced labour and its 11 indicators to help identify and assess risks in practice.

Who is it for?

The primary audience includes companies (management, human resources, procurement, legal, compliance, and sustainability officers); employer and business membership organizations (EBMOs); industry associations; multi-stakeholder platforms supporting responsible business conduct (RBC); and other actors involved in human rights due diligence (HRDD).

Hard to see, harder to count: Handbook on forced labour surveys

This revised version of the "Hard to see, harder to count" handbook provides an updated set of tools for the design, implementation and analysis of quantitative surveys on the forced labour of adults.

Data collection and analysis lie at the heart of sustainable action to combat forced labour. Reliable statistics are essential to understand the nature and extent of the problem, its causes and consequences, and to inform the efforts of policy-makers and other stakeholders against forced labour. Regular data collection also enables the assessment of progress and impact of policy  implementation, action plans and specific programmes and projects to eradicate forced labour.

The 20th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) in 2018 endorsed, for the first time, Guidelines Concerning the Measurement of Forced Labour. In 2022, the ILO, Walk Free and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) published “Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage”. This was the fourth effort by the ILO to produce global regional estimates of forced labour (2005, 2012, and 2017) and the first global estimates published after the adoption of the ICLS Guidelines. In addition, a total of 17 national and sectoral forced labour prevalence surveys have been undertaken with ILO support since 2018.

In 2012, the ILO published the handbook Harder to See, Harder to Count, the first practical guidance on forced labour prevalence surveys. Based on new ICLS guidelines, and drawing on the lessons learnt from the subsequent global estimates exercise and forced labour prevalence surveys, this version 2.0 of the Hard to See, Harder to Count handbook presents an updated measurement framework and set of tools for the design, implementation and analysis of surveys of forced labour. The revised handbook presents a new unified set of core indicators of involuntary work and coercion and contains two new dedicated chapters, one on research ethics and the other on state-imposed forced labour.

Starting with an introductory discussion of legal and conceptual frameworks (Chapter 1), the handbook takes a researcher sequentially through all the key stages of a forced labour survey, from initial stakeholder consultations, the conduct of a preliminary scoping study, and the identification of the survey scope and research questions (Chapter 2), to the selection of the survey type and modality (Chapter 3), sample design (Chapter 4), questionnaire design (Chapter 5), fieldwork (Chapter 6) and finally to data analysis (Chapter 7). It also covers key ethical considerations across all these survey stages (Chapter 8). Chapter 9 offers specific guidance to researchers for the measurement of state-imposed forced labour.