GENEVA (AP) — Illegal profits from forced labor have risen worldwide to the “obscene” amount of $236 billion a year, the U.N. labor agency reported Tuesday, with three-quarters of the revenue coming from a business that discriminates against migrants Sexual exploitation takes money to send home, deprives legal workers of jobs and enables the criminals behind it to evade taxes.

The International Labor Organization said the tally for 2021, the latest year examined in the painstaking international study, represents an increase of 37%, or $64 billion, compared to its last estimate published a decade ago. According to the ILO, this is because more people are being exploited and more money is being made from each victim.

“$236 billion. “This is the obscene amount of annual profit made from forced labor in today’s world,” reads the first line of the report’s introduction. This figure includes income “effectively taken out of workers’ pockets” by those who force them to work, as well as money from migrant remittances and lost tax revenues for governments.

ILO officials noted that such a sum is equivalent to the economic output of EU member Croatia and dwarfs the annual revenues of tech giants such as Microsoft and Samsung.

Forced labor can promote corruption, strengthen criminal networks and create incentives for further exploitation, according to the ILO.

Its general director, Gilbert Houngbo, would like to see international cooperation in the fight against thuggery.

“People in forced labor are subject to multiple forms of coercion, with deliberate and systematic withholding of wages being among the most common,” he said in a statement. “Forced labor perpetuates the cycle of poverty and exploitation and strikes at the core of human dignity.”

“We now know that the situation has only gotten worse,” Houngbo added.

The ILO defines forced labor as work carried out against the will of the worker and enforced under punishment – ​​or the threat of punishment. This can happen at any stage of employment: in recruitment, in the living conditions associated with work, or by forcing people to stay in their jobs when they want to leave them.

On any given day in 2021, an estimated 27.6 million people were in forced labor – a 10% increase from five years earlier, the ILO said. More than half of these were native to the Asia-Pacific region, while Africa, the Americas and Europe-Central Asia each accounted for around 13% to 14%.

About 85% of those affected worked in “privately imposed forced labor,” which can include slavery, servitude, debt bondage and activities such as forms of begging in which the money collected goes to someone else, the ILO said. The rest were forced into forced labor by government authorities, a practice not covered in the study.

Some critics have railed against “modern slavery” in places like the Alabama prison system.

ILO experts said state-imposed forced labor was excluded from the report because of a lack of data – although it is estimated to have affected nearly four million people.

“The ILO condemns cases of state-imposed forced labor wherever they occur, whether in prison systems or the abuse of conscription or other forms or manifestations of state and ex-post forced labor,” said Scott Lyon, a senior policy official at the ILO.

While the report said just over a quarter of victims worldwide were victims of sexual exploitation, this accounted for nearly $173 billion in profits, or nearly three-quarters of the global total – a sign of the higher margins that come from selling sex were achieved.

Some 6.3 million people faced situations of forced commercial sexual exploitation every day three years ago – and almost four in five of those victims were girls or women, according to the ILO. Children accounted for more than a quarter of all cases.

Forced labor in industry was a distant second at $35 billion, followed by services at nearly $21 billion, agriculture at $5 billion and domestic labor at $2.6 billion the employment agency based in Geneva.

Manuela Tomei, the ILO’s deputy director-general for governance, told a conference to launch the report in Brussels – where the European Union Parliament is close to finalizing new rules to combat forced labor – that “no region is immune” from the practice Forced labor and all sectors of the economy are affected.

While the conference cited countries like the United States for their efforts to combat forced labor, Tomei said the world was “a long way” from meeting the U.N.’s goals of eliminating forced labor by 2030.

Valdis Dombrovskis, executive vice president of the European Commission, called the ILO’s findings “shocking and appalling.”

“Forced labor is the opposite of social justice,” he said. “Let me be very clear. Business must never be done at the expense of workers, dignity and workers’ rights.”