Labor trafficking involves recruiting, enticing, transporting, harboring, providing, or otherwise obtaining a person for forced labor or services gained through the use of force, fraud, or coercion. Labor trafficking occurs in a number of different industries, but the most common nationwide are domestic work, agriculture and animal husbandry, and traveling sales crews.
Although national data suggests that labor trafficking affects about 1/3 of the victims that sex trafficking does, a recent Texas survey suggests that Texas might be different. In surveying a diverse range of organizations serving trafficking victims in the state, these organizations estimated that the amount of labor trafficking they were encountering was 50%, with almost 20% of that being the labor trafficking of children under 18. Forty percent of that was reported as international labor trafficking.
The average age of entry into labor trafficking for victims is 22, and a strong majority of them were recruited through a job offer or advertisement that turned out to be false or misleading. Recent relocation or migration most commonly made a person vulnerable to victimization, although other vulnerabilities include unstable housing, a criminal record, health issues, and substance abuse.