What Can Organizations Do to Combat Human Trafficking?

Section 5: Business Plicy, ethics, and law Human trafficking has become a relatively common term used by the media, policy makers, and scholars. In particular, criminologists and sociologists have been interested in this social issue for decades, but numerous other disciplines such as psychology (especially in the area of dealing with the complex trauma that victims undergo), economics, political science and others have been tackling the issue. However, it appears as a still relatively new topic for industrial-organizational psychologists. The objectives of this chapter consist of discussing the most influential definitions of human trafficking and presenting the latest statistics that articulate diverse forms of this crime, in order to delineate specific ways in which the organization managers can actively participate in efforts to combat it. This chapter discusses human trafficking in the context of organization management and corporate social responsibility. On the one hand, workplaces may directly or indirectly benefit from slave labor; on the other hand, there is a potential for some less obvious links with sex trafficking, especially when it comes to individual workers and some unspoken rules of organizational culture. This creates a number of possibilities for a workplace to actively engage in fighting human trafficking, especially in the areas of prevention and partnership. Annually updated Trafficking in Persons Report consistently pays more attention to the role of organizations. The latest edition draws the readers’ attention to using financial transactions to uncover human trafficking and features a number of tools developed by inter-governmental organizations