On March 3, 2025, a new session of the Belgrade Legal Theory Group (BLTG) was organized with Virginia Mantouvalou as the guest speaker. She delivered a lecture titled “Structural Injustice and Workers’ Rights”, which is exploring how legislative frameworks, despite being designed with prima facie legitimate aims, often create or reinforce exploitative structures that trap workers in conditions of vulnerability. Mantouvalou’s approach moved beyond the individual responsibility of employers and traffickers, instead emphasizing state-mediated structural injustice, where laws and policies themselves generate and sustain labour exploitation.
The lecture began by critically assessing the UK Modern Slavery Act (MSA 2015), which was introduced to combat ‘modern slavery’ but, as Mantouvalou argued, fails to address the structural factors that produce and perpetuate exploitation. She highlighted the paradox where trafficked and exploited workers, instead of receiving protection, often end up in immigration detention, performing underpaid labour within detention centres before being deported—potentially re-entering cycles of exploitation. By defining exploitation as the violation of labour rights for profit, Mantouvalou stressed the need to shift focus from individual wrongdoing to broader legal and economic structures.
Mantouvalou then outlined three key legislative patterns that foster exploitation. First, she examined the case of domestic workers, particularly migrant workers on restrictive visas. Domestic work, often undervalued and invisible due to its association with household labour, is frequently excluded from protective labour legislation, leaving workers vulnerable to abuse. The legal framework, particularly visa regulations that tie workers to specific employers, increases their dependency and limits their ability to escape exploitation.
The second example concerned prison labour and work in immigration detention. In the UK, prisoners are excluded from minimum wage laws and typically earn as little as £10 per week. The stated aims of this system—rehabilitation and cost reduction—mask a structural pattern where incarcerated individuals provide cheap labour under exploitative conditions. Similarly, immigration detainees, including asylum seekers and migrants awaiting deportation, work in private detention centres under precarious conditions, reinforcing economic dependence and vulnerability.
The third example focused on welfare conditionality and precarious work, particularly welfare-to-work schemes like Universal Credit, which impose strict conditions on access to benefits. While these policies are intended to encourage employment, empirical evidence suggests that they often trap individuals in low-paid, insecure jobs, reinforcing in-work poverty rather than alleviating it. Mantouvalou emphasized that these policies, rather than serving as a pathway out of poverty, often force individuals into exploitative labour arrangements with little opportunity for stability or upward mobility.
In analyzing these examples, Mantouvalou drew upon Iris Marion Young’s theory of structural injustice, distinguishing it from individual wrongdoing or state-driven direct exploitation. Structural injustice, in this context, emerges when laws and policies systematically disadvantage certain groups while benefiting others. Although state authorities may not intend harm, their legal frameworks shape power relations in ways that sustain systemic inequality. Employers benefit from these structures, but responsibility extends beyond individual actors to the state itself, which must be held accountable for creating and maintaining such conditions.
Mantouvalou concluded by considering the potential role of human rights law in addressing state-mediated structural injustice. The discussion that followed explored how these insights could inform legal reforms to prevent structural exploitation, both in the UK and in other jurisdictions, including Serbia. The session concluded with a rich Q&A, where participants engaged in a critical debate on the responsibility of states in labour exploitation, the effectiveness of current legal frameworks, and the possibilities for reform to ensure greater protection for vulnerable workers.