By Dr.Gayani Samarakoon
Precarious work remains a major global concern despite strong legal frameworks and multi-stakeholder initiatives such as International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to promote decent work. Yet new, increasingly insecure forms of work continue to emerge.
In Sri Lanka, platform work, operating through digital apps and algorithmic management, has become increasingly visible, particularly in passenger and goods transportation. Despite the growing importance of this form of work, many platform workers have limited employment protection, uncertain incomes, few employee benefits, and considerable occupational risks.
While platform work has become particularly visible among men, many women in Sri Lanka experience precarious employment in the spa industry, facing employment insecurity alongside social stigma and limited recognition. Research on Sri Lankan spa workers shows many are not formally recognized as employees, may lack employment contracts, and have limited protection under labor law, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and harassment (Ilangasingha et al., 2023). The stigma attached to spa work further compounds this vulnerability by limiting workers’ ability to claim professional identities and social recognition.
These are only two visible examples of precarious work in Sri Lanka; domestic work, casual employment, manpower-agency work and other non-standard arrangements also expose workers to insecurity. Allan, Autin and Wilkins-Yel (2021) conceptualize precarious work as instability in the continuity and quantity of work, restrictions on workers’ ability to advocate for change, and inadequate protection against workplace abuse and unsafe conditions. They distinguish three dimensions: precarity of work (whether work continues), precarity at work (safety and treatment), and precarity from work (whether it provides enough to meet basic needs).
Precarious work can take many forms, differing from the traditional model of full-time, permanent employment through temporary, part-time, contract, casual, agency, or platform-based arrangements, which earlier scholarship termed non-standard or atypical work and alternative work arrangements (Kalleberg, 2000; Spreitzer et al., 2017). Economic insecurity is another important dimension. Workers may face low or unpredictable incomes, limited access to healthcare and retirement benefits, or an inability to earn a living wage. Thus, precariousness is not simply about the type of employment contract but about the quality, security and protection associated with work (Allan et al., 2021), and needs to be understood through its social, institutional, geographical and historical context rather than a single universal model (Doshi et al., 2026).
Modern Slavery
Slavery may appear to belong to the past, but although the formal ownership of human beings has been abolished almost everywhere, severe forms of exploitation continue in contemporary economies. The ILO, Walk Free and IOM estimated 50 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, including 28 million in forced labor and 22 million in forced marriage (ILO, Walk Free, & IOM, 2022).
The nature of slavery, however, has changed. Ownership over another person has increasingly been replaced by forms of control, which Mende (2018) argues is now the contemporary parameter of ownership in modern slavery. Three elements are particularly important in identifying modern slavery: control, involuntariness and exploitation (Mende, 2018). It therefore cannot be confined to one region, country or industry, but must be understood in relation to the conditions in which exploitation takes place. Modern slavery should therefore not be understood simply as an extreme form of low-paid or insecure work. The central issue is the extent to which a person’s freedom is undermined through control, coercion and exploitation.
Modern slavery is also a complex, intersectional problem (Arun & Olsen, 2023). It is not produced by employer behavior, but through the interaction of gender inequality, social class, poverty, migration status, discrimination, lack of worker voice, weak laws and poor enforcement, and pressures within global supply chains. The Sri Lankan context provides important evidence of this complexity. Following a country visit from 26 November to 3 December 2021, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery concluded that such practices persisted in the country, particularly affecting children, women, and ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities. The Special Rapporteur called for stronger efforts to eliminate these practices.
The End of Mission Statement also highlighted continuing child labor, including hazardous domestic work, hospitality, cleaning and sexual exploitation in tourism, that was particularly severe in poor rural areas populated by ethnic minorities, including Malaiyaha and Sri Lankan Tamils. The COVID-19 pandemic further intensified these vulnerabilities through school closures, dropout, and the loss of adult livelihoods.
Recent evidence from Sri Lanka’s tea sector makes this connection visible. Amnesty International’s 2026 investigation into Malaiyaha Tamil workers in private tea estates and smallholdings documented serious abuses, including debt bondage, restrictions on movement, withheld wages, threats and physical violence, and raised concerns about workers being classified as “casual” and thereby losing access to employment rights and social protection. This evidence is particularly significant for understanding the relationship between precarious work and modern slavery. Casual employment and inadequate social protection represent forms of employment insecurity, but when these conditions intersect with debt, threats, violence and withheld wages, they can become indicators of forced labor, illustrating how precarity can create vulnerability that is exploited through more severe forms of labor control.
Hewamanne (2021) provides another Sri Lankan example. Women in the country’s global assembly-line economy, including daily-hired workers in the Katunayake and Biyagama Free Trade Zones and former factory workers turned home-based subcontractors, whose insecurity was intensified by COVID-19 factory closures, income loss and weakened bargaining power. Similarly, Christ (2025) examines knowledge and perceptions of modern slavery within Sri Lanka’s tea industry and highlights that modern slavery cannot be separated from the wider systems of production, purchasing and supply-chain governance.
Precarious Work and Modern Slavery: Related but Not the Same
Precarious work and modern slavery are closely related, but they are not the same phenomenon.
The central feature of precarious work is insecurity. Unstable employment, unpredictable incomes, weak protection, limited benefits and restricted voice. Modern slavery, by contrast, is characterized by severe exploitation, coercion and the undermining of freedom. For example, A platform driver with unpredictable income, no paid leave and limited employment protection may be experiencing precarious work, but this does not automatically mean modern slavery. Similarly, a domestic worker may be poorly paid with limited social protection without necessarily being a victim of forced labor.
Modern slavery involves a more fundamental restriction of freedom through mechanisms such as threats, coercion, deception, debt bondage or other forms of control. Therefore, precarity can create vulnerability to exploitation, but vulnerability alone does not constitute modern slavery. Precarity can create vulnerability to exploitation, but vulnerability alone does not constitute modern slavery.
The tea-estate experience demonstrates this relationship clearly. A worker classified as casual may initially experience precarity through insecure employment and limited benefits, but if that insecurity is combined with debt bondage, withheld wages, threats or restrictions on movement, the situation may move beyond precarity towards forced labor.
This distinction is important because describing every form of insecure employment as modern slavery weakens the concept’s analytical meaning, while ignoring the relationship between precarious employment and severe exploitation hides the structural conditions that make modern slavery possible.
Ending Precarious Work and Modern Slavery; Providing Strong Legal Protection, Empowering Worker Voice, and Social, Economic and Political Reform
Addressing precarious work and modern slavery requires more than strengthening laws. it requires a combination of legal protection, worker voice, social protection and broader social, economic and political reform. Sri Lanka already has a substantial body of labor legislation, including the Wages Boards Ordinance, Shop and Office Employees legislation, Trade Unions legislation, the Employment of Women, Young Persons and Children Act, and the Factories Ordinance, which are important foundations for protecting workers.
An important recent development is Sri Lanka’s ratification of the ILO Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (Convention No. 190) on 16 April 2026 (which will enter into force for Sri Lanka on 16 April 2027), a formal commitment to strengthening workplace protections against violence and harassment. The challenge, however, is translating this commitment into effective protection, particularly for workers in informal, casual and non-standard employment. The UN Special Rapporteur’s findings demonstrate why implementation matters. Laws do not automatically protect vulnerable workers if labor inspections are inadequate, workers cannot access justice, or employers can circumvent protections.
Worker voice is another critical mechanism for reducing precarity and preventing exploitation. Sri Lanka has a long history of trade unionism and legal provisions supporting freedom of association, but traditional forms of collective representation struggle to reach workers in fragmented, non-standard arrangements. Trade unions may also be complemented or replaced by management-driven mechanisms such as workers’ councils, which can provide opportunities for communication but cannot always substitute for genuinely independent representation. Workers need meaningful opportunities to raise concerns and challenge unsafe or exploitative practices without fear of retaliation, an important mechanism for preventing exploitation and protecting human dignity at work.
Finally, reducing precarity requires broader reforms addressing the social and economic conditions that produce vulnerability. Minimum-wage regulation provides one example of how public policy can establish minimum standards and reduce economic insecurity, though such measures alone cannot eliminate precarious work or modern slavery. However, they illustrate how governments can intervene to reduce the economic vulnerability that may push workers towards increasingly insecure forms of employment.
Dr. Gayani Samarakoon is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Management Studies and Commerce at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. She holds a PhD from Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her broader research interests span corporate social responsibility, business ethics and worker voice in the Global South, with a particular focus on labour conditions in Sri Lanka’s export manufacturing sector.
