The construction sector holds great economic importance worldwide. It is recognized as the ‘biggest non-agricultural industry in the capitalist world’ (Srivastava and Sutradhar, 2016: 2). It stands as the foremost consumer of raw materials globally, and it was forecast to achieve growth of 4.2 per cent annually from 2018 to 2023 in terms of market value (Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition and International Finance Corporation, 2018). Furthermore, its interdependence with various sub-sectors – such as cement, iron, steel, and brick production, and service sectors such as education, finance, or health – makes it an important part of numerous global value chains (GVCs). Indeed, major construction companies often serve as lead firms in both product value chains and human supply chains (Gordon, 2017; Crane et al., 2019; Barkay et al., 2024).

This interdependence between the construction sector and numerous sub-sectors involves both vertical and horizontal intersections within diverse value chains. The scale of the processes, phases, and stakeholders involved in the construction process within these diverse value chains – such as design, production, conversion of raw materials into manufactured products, and on-site construction – highlights the sector's economic significance (Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition and International Finance Corporation, 2018: 2). Nevertheless, the sheer number of processes, combined with ‘the fixed-term, project-based nature of relationships along the supply chain’ contributes to a highly fragmented and multi-tiered structure in the sector (Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition and International Finance Corporation, 2018: 2). Construction projects are not only characterized by significant variability in type and scale, ranging from buildings to major civil engineering projects and large-scale infrastructures, but are also at the mercy of ‘local conditions, purpose, regulations, codes, and resources that evolve with time’ (Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition and International Finance Corporation, 2018: 6). Therefore, to understand the complexities of labour exploitation within construction projects, a highly nuanced analysis of GVCs is required.