Description
This paper examines the working lives of migrant women in the sex sector in Ghana, in light of surging global interest in the governance of “slavery and trafficking”. The paper draws on qualitative data gathered in Ghana in 2021, namely 30 interviews with migrant sex workers. Interview data document wide-ranging and systematic experiences of exploitation, including some of the most extreme forms of unfreedom considered “modern slavery”. Yet the overwhelming majority of workers report that they entered into and stay in sex work out of economic necessity (i.e. rather than individualised, extra-economic relations of coercion), typically due to caring responsibilities. This indicates that liberal accounts of modern slavery are inadequate to capture the material bases and political economic drivers of migrant women’s vulnerability and exploitation. As an alternative, the paper uses the lens of unfree labour to highlight how extreme exploitation emerges from a broader continuum of labour unfreedoms that are (re)produced through state laws and border regimes, neoliberal economic restructuring, and attendant crises of social reproduction. These crises determine the material conditions—of precarity, inequality, and insecurity—in which migrant women enter into and stay in highly exploitative forms of work within (and beyond) the sex sector in Ghana, as a means of household survival. The paper advances the critical literature on unfree labour empirically by exploring these dynamics in a West African context, in an informal, feminised industry comprising large numbers of internal and intra-regional migrants, and theoretically by linking sex work, unfree labour and (crises of) social reproduction.