NEW figures show that slavery is on the increase across the globe. These are words I simply should not be writing in the 21st century.

Walk Free, the International Organisation for Migration and the International Labour Organisation estimate in their recently released Global Slavery Index that nearly 50 million people were now enslaved.

The damning report showing that 49.6m people are trapped in slavery should bring shame to the leaders of the world who have chosen to ignore it or — worse still — condone it by their inaction.

By slavery, I mean people who are forced to work against their will and whose bodies are owned or controlled by an exploiter.

They also have limited freedom of movement and are treated as a commodity that can be bought and sold.

Karl Marx was very clear in his writings to distinguish between chattel slavery and wage labour.

He said: “We are not dealing with indirect slavery, the slavery of the proletariat, we are dealing with direct slavery.”

Marx also saw and wrote about how slavery paved the way for the emergence of Western capitalism.

The current form of slavery enables Western capitalism to continue to flourish.

We can talk all we like about the need for a new world order that prioritises the needs of the global South but unless that includes ending slavery it is meaningless to millions now in captivity and many more fearing they might be next.

I’m a descendant of Africans who were enslaved during the murderous transatlantic trade in human beings from the 16th to the 19th century.

During that period around 20 million Africans were forcibly shipped across the sacred burial grounds known as the Atlantic Ocean to work on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas.

The Atlantic is a sacred burial ground because of the millions thrown overboard by the slave traders or those who chose death in the waters rather than enslavement.

But there are now more people in slavery than at any time in history and this should send shivers down the spine of any other human being and galvanise activists to commit to its elimination.

The enslaved people of today are mainly women and girls with many trapped in forced marriages.

Most enslaved people — more than 25 million — are forced to provide free labour for private-sector companies in cleaning jobs, the garment industry, picking fruit and vegetables, fishing, construction and digging for the natural resources that help to power the capitalist economy of the global North.

Millions are also exploited to satisfy the sexual desires of the global North demonstrating that anything and everyone has a price to the capitalists as long as it makes a profit.

Many millions of enslaved people find themselves sold to be soldiers in a war in a place they have probably never heard of and for a cause/reason never told to them.

But the fact is that slavery is still big business — profit, as always, being the key motivator.

During the transatlantic trade, many fortunes were made that enabled numerous families and companies to continue to live in the lap of luxury created by their enslavement of Africans.

It was big business back in the day but it is even bigger business now.

It is estimated that more than £150 billion in profits are made from slavery every year — and, given the circumstances, this is likely to be a gross underestimate.

Another estimate has today’s slave traders reaping around 30 times more in profits than their counterparts from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Each forced worker is said to generate around $10,000 each year in profits. But things are even more lucrative for sex traffickers. They are reportedly racking in an average of around $40,000 per human being.

Around 70 per cent of victims of sex trafficking are reportedly in the Asia and Pacific regions. Africa is said to have the most forced marriages.

These figures are unreliable and likely to be a gross underestimate but a slew of reports demonstrate that there are few countries untainted by slavery, including at least 15,000 enslaved in Britain.

Whilst my ancestors were most likely captured, transported and sold into slavery, these days there is a large supply of vulnerable exploitable people escaping poverty, war, famine and the effects of the climate emergency who can be conned and/or forced into enslavement.

The fact that poverty, war, famine and the climate emergency have in large part been caused by the very people in the global North who are reaping the biggest dividends from the modern version of slavery is the topic of a future column.

For now, we just need to transform our revulsion at how capitalism creates a crisis and then profits from it no matter what the human cost, into real action against the continued scandalous trade in human beings.

But it seems that many people are still prepared to turn a blind eye to slavery if it gets in the way of maintaining their lifestyles or distracting from their favourite pastimes.

Much of the infrastructure for the men’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar was built using migrant labour — much of it forced.

Hardly a secret. It was well documented before the tournament. The proportion of forced labour in Qatar is hard to attribute but it’s pretty certain that the labourers did not receive a fair share of the $7bn to build seven new stadiums and the eye-watering $300bn spent on infrastructure projects overall.

Complicating an analysis of the level of abuse faced by migrant workers in Qatar is a system common in Gulf states called “kafala.”

Kafala gives sponsors almost total control of the employment and immigration status of migrant workers.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants were trapped in this system of exploitation while building the stadiums that hosted some of the best-paid and most brilliant footballers.

If this doesn’t amount to a form of enslavement then I don’t know what does.

Several human rights groups allege that even the kits worn in Qatar and at the recent women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand may have been produced by the forced labour of the long and well-known exploitative international garment industry.

Governments and enforcement agencies have shown not the remotest indication that they will take serious steps to end the scandal of modern-day slavery.

This means that the international trade union movement needs to step up to tackle the legal exploitative employers and governments must be forced to take firm action against the traffickers without blaming the enslaved for their plight.

More than this though, activists need to do much more to act on the declaration by Marx that “labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”

Not all today’s modern-day slaves may have black skin but the principle of Marxists taking much more seriously the need to tackle slavery is perhaps even more relevant today as human enslavement continues to grow across the planet.