Migrant sex work beyond slavery and trafficking: sex work, unfree labour and the crisis of social reproduction in Ghana

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 labour exploitation, including some of the worst forms of unfreedom characterised as “modern slavery”. Yet the 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. To explain this, the paper makes two interrelated arguments: firstly, it shows why the concept of “unfree labour” is more appropriate than “modern slavery” for capturing how extreme exploitation emerges from a continuum of labour unfreedom in the Ghanaian sex sector. Unfreedom is (re)produced through state laws, relations of (re)production, and trajectories of neoliberal economic restructuring, which have given rise to widespread precarisation and informalisation. Secondly, the paper argues that extant studies of unfree labour should pay greater attention to the crisis of social reproduction as a key structural driver of unfree labour. This crisis constitutes the broader material conditions in which migrant women in Ghana enter into and stay in highly exploitative forms of work within the sex sector, as a means of household survival. The paper contextualises this crisis not only in relation to neoliberalism, but to the longue durée of colonial capitalism in Ghana.