The Intersection of Exploitation and Coercion in Cases of Canadian Labour Trafficking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Internationally, human trafficking intervention, research, and policy-making has leaned towards sex trafficking rather than labour trafficking. Aiming to understand the characteristics of labour trafficking within Canada, a country considered by many to have strong labour protections and clear pathways for labour migration, this article reports on a review of documented cases over the past fifteen years in Canada where labour exploitation intersected with coercion. Our analysis is centred on the notion that this is the crux of what constitutes labour trafficking—coercion being used to facilitate labour exploitation. In total, we collected thirty-six cases, involving an estimated 243 victims, and we placed these within a matrix that crosses gradations of labour exploitation (deception, labour standard violations, and occupational health and safety (OHS) violations) with gradations of coercion (from systemic to direct). We collected these cases through a scan of media, governmental, academic, and legal sources. A new contribution to the literature, this exploitation-coercion matrix helps to highlight limitations in current approaches to the identification and response to labour trafficking in Canada. Our study results demonstrate: 1) the degree to which precarious immigration status is central to labour trafficking; 2) that this trafficking is frequently practised by small business owners in legal employment sectors; and 3) that there is a high presence of men and low presence of minors as victims. These findings contrast with the archetypal portraits found in much of the trafficking media and literature of the trafficking victim as young and female and the trafficker as organized criminal.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".