From Sports Direct warehouses to nail bars, awareness-raising campaigns warn that modern slavery is happening all around us. Over Christmas, fashion brand Boohoo cut ties with 64 garment suppliers in Leicester after it came out that factories were paying their workers as little as £3.50 an hour. And this month the foreign secretary said he would clamp down on companies who used forced labour in their supply chains.

But how useful is the concept of ​‘modern slavery’? What kinds of exploitation does it disguise? And what does it say about how we’ve designed our economy?

For the first episode of a new series of the Weekly Economics Podcast, Ayeisha is joined by Emily Kenway to find out the truth about modern slavery. 

Grab a copy of Emily’s book, out now with Pluto Books. 

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Image: Andrew Parsons /​No 10 Downing Street