Global Education Lab #2: Forced Labour

Global Education Lab is an annual series of skillshare weeks for educators working on global justice, neocolonialism and global supply chains. With this series, we want to highlight, promote and expand critical and decolonial pedagogy around North-South relations in times of globalized capitalism destroying our planet. Educators, youth workers and activists from different parts of the world come together to share and create educational methods, approaches, social media content and solidarity on urgent topics. Global Education Lab #1 in 2024 was about Extractivism. Our long term aim is to create a network of people doing Global Education and to create a database of high quality educational methods for educators to adapt to their local context.

Our focus this year is forced labour. 27.6 million people in the world are forced to work under threat or coercion and without the ability to leave freely, especially in industries like agriculture, construction, domestic labour, fashion and sexual exploitation. Some extreme forms of modern slavery involve control over someone’s life, including selling, buying and inheriting them. Some people are forcibly moved to another place  (human trafficking) in order to perform forced labour.

Many multinational corporations based in Europe are involved in upholding modern slavery in the Global South. Also Swiss companies source raw materials and products from regions where forced labour is prevalent. While there have been attempts to regulate this through supply chain laws and import bans, these efforts have not been successful in ending modern slavery. Labour conditions in many parts of the world are horrible. Education around this topic can and needs to empower European citizens to get active against this.

Our objectives with this skillshare

• We want to exchange knowledge around and share specific cases of forced labour in the Global South.
• We want to look at what is already being done to protest and resist this phenomenon both in the Global North and in the Global South and talk about Human Rights Defenders.
• We want to discuss how promoting alternative economic models can help abolish modern slavery.
• We want to develop and share educational methods that can help us do workshops on this topic in youth settings.

Expected outcome

• Create a short educational video and a social media campaign for youth about forced labour in the Global South that can be used as educational material.
• Work on a small toolkit with 2-3 methods about forced labour and guidelines on how to relate global questions to young people’s local realities
• Encourage participants to do local workshops as a follow-up
• Continued creation of a network of people working in Global Education

This project is funded by the Swiss government agency Movetia.