>This is very much not slavery. It's terrible, it's fraud, and it's arguably indentured servitude, but it's not slavery. Calling it slavery is an insult to people who are owned and chained.
Actually trivializing it because it doesn't meet some ideal of what slavery should be is the actual insult to people who have to live through that hell life.
And the people indeed are or have been "owned and chained" would have no problem with calling such an injustice slavery too. That would be actually petty of them...
Not to mention that historically and globally there have been many forms and traditions of slavery and servitude -- including similar debt schemes, used even back in ancient Greece and Rome.
> You DO know that the very word "Slavery" has a very specific meaning here in the United States, yes.
It might to some people. I consider those people to be somewhat wrong. Slavery has happened for a long time before Atlantic slave trade and didn't end with it.
> Probably "bondage" or "indentured servitude" or "traffiking" or "imprisonment" combined with "forced labor" will more accurately describe what you're trying to communicate to American audiences.
> When the word "Slavery" is used in America, it only means institutionalized laws endorsed by The U.S. Government, to specifically target Black People and only Black People, and deny them a normal existence among peers.
Ok? Other countries have had slavery until much later (e.g. India until 1970's). What's your point. The reason why American slavery is getting so much attention is due to the clear racial divide between the two classes of people. This somehow makes it more morally reprehensible than other forms of slavery?
There's no trademark on the word "slavery" right? Stop making it seem like there is.
> Slavery is an extreme form of discrimination where the out-group is deemed subhuman.
Ugh, no, don't argue in favor of my beliefs this badly. We know what slavery is, and creative redefinitions only make you sound dishonest. Slavery, real slavery, still exists in the US, and we don't have to make up weird definitions to say that.
Slavery still exists in the US, legally. The thirteenth amendment says:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." (Emphasis mine).
This is a massive loophole, and one which has been taken full advantage of. By criminalizing things which shouldn't be criminalized, and then enforcing those laws unequally, you can effectively enslave a large portion of whatever group you want to.
In some cases such as Angola prison, the prisoners/slaves are literally forced to pick cotton for no pay. In other cases, the prisoners/slaves are paid some small amount: this is better for optics, but these same prisons easily recover the money by vending basic necessities at gouged prices: if you pay a seamstress $1/hour and then charge her $10 for a tampon at commissary, that's not pay. Prisoners can't shop elsewhere and can't work elsewhere.
And to be clear: the work isn't voluntary. Refusal to work is punished with solitary confinement and sensory deprivation--and that's if they bother to comply with the law instead of just beating prisoners who don't work or paying another prisoner to shank them. With little oversight, there's little stopping prisons from doing this.
In addition to lack of oversight allowing abuses of power, it also allows unsafe work conditions. Prisoners/slaves are unable to report unsafe conditions to anyone, and when unsafe conditions occur, there's no incentive to fix them.
Prison slavery is used by a variety of industries. JCPenney and KMart use prison slavery to manufacture clothes, IBM uses prison slavery to assemble circuitry, Wendy's and McDonald's use prison slavery to process foods.
> Those people are talking about society as still having slavery - in effect - because they realize, after their freedom, what it actually was the entire time.
Comparing a mortgage to slavery is wildly out of touch with the horrors of actual slavery. Let’s pick a different word to discuss the relative inconvenience of having to have a job in modern society.
>There is no room in a civilized society for bondage and servitude through violence.
Absolutely, I think the point I'm trying to make is that slavery or something a whole lot like it has existed long since explicit buying and selling of human lives ended. To make an inappropriate cultural reference, many different situations "just sound like slavery with extra steps"
> a product of an environment that gave her no reasonable alternative
I think a whole lot of poor people in America and the world beyond don't really find themselves it conditions much different than this sort of slavery. Coercive violence and lack of choice not excepted. The illusion of choice and freedom that a tiny wage give doesn't necessarily make liberty real, it just makes slavery a little more difficult to recognise.
> You don't understand what slavery is. Slaves don't get paid and it isn't voluntary
Technically, that varies. Slavery is as old as humanity itself and it exists in different forms. It's not even unheard of for a slave to be wealthier than his master, although, of course, this is more of an exception. What I'm trying to say is if someone isn't picking up cotton in the american south, it doesn't mean they cannot be enslaved and don't need help
>Equating slavery with forced labour belittles the gravity and awfulness of what actual slavery is (or was).
Doesn't matter. That's a crap argument.
First, because enlarging some things (which necessitates belittling others) can help put an end to them.
Second, because forced labor and slavery are not that far off anyway. Both are depriving a person of their agency and steal their time and effort.
Third, because slavery itself was historically a spectrum. There were "domestic slaves" (sorta like Stephen in Django), cooks, nannys, teachers and "butler" types in charge of estate work in ancient Rome and Greece, etc.) that were treated and worked more or less like modern employees (except from the forced labor), even slaves in management of other slaves, and slaves that were chained, worked to the bone, beaten, raped, etc.
> I find all these slavery comparisons in poor taste. Across history you will find slaves that were treated well, accumulated wealth, were educated and held in high regard - yet they still legally were the property of another person. The fundamental distinction with slavery is not a bad paycheck.
How do you hold someone in high regard when they are your property? You cannot see me as less than yet hold me in high regard!
Right! A slave or two that were "treated well" speaks for generations that were maimed, raped, erased from existence.
The only thing I could discern from this is that you would have owned slaves were you born in that era.
> If you don't think that just as painful as slavery you're a grade A idiot.
If you have to resort to name-calling to make your point ... you're wrong. It's that simple.
When you're a slave, no matter how talented your are, no matter how hard you work ... you're still a slave and you will always be a slave, and your children too, will be slaves.
That situation is truly inhuman. Truly. So much so that the bible, the founding document of our civilization, had a built-in reset for precisely this. [1]
When you're free, your circumstances may suck ... but at least you have a chance to improve them, however remote that chance may be.
> I do not intend to be deceptive. You have provided overly simplistic vision of slavery and I have provided some counterexamples.
No you have not. You have selectively quoted parts of a Wikipedia article to portray Roman slavery as though slaves were treated well and had reliable paths to freedom. This is absolutely not the case, slaves had little to no protection and were subject to whim of their masters who could harm them without repercussion.
> This seems to me like a vision of an American dream of sorts. Promise of social mobility for a choosen [sic] few members of lower class to become middle class. The problem is that for the last 30 years American dream isn't working anymore. It is rather that middle class poeple are pushed in lower class ranks.
Sure. But how on Earth do you go from, "social mobility isn't as good as I would like" to "gig workers are comparable to slaves"? You're clearly reluctant to defend this statement, probably because you've realized how inane it really is.
> If you pass by the slightly inflammatory language (“indentured servitude”) it’s just a different model.
"Indentured servitude" is the nice way of saying this. "Slavery" is the inflammatory way of saying it.
> As in: if I want to go and work on Mars, but can’t afford the flight, it’s not unreasonable to take a proportion of my earnings up front (in kind) and then work off that debt subsequently. Obviously the devil is in the detail of how that would work, and which protections I might be afforded, but the underlying concept doesn’t seem bad to me.
Those who do not learn history are bound to repeat it.
Actually trivializing it because it doesn't meet some ideal of what slavery should be is the actual insult to people who have to live through that hell life.
And the people indeed are or have been "owned and chained" would have no problem with calling such an injustice slavery too. That would be actually petty of them...
Not to mention that historically and globally there have been many forms and traditions of slavery and servitude -- including similar debt schemes, used even back in ancient Greece and Rome.
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