Slavery never went away.
Yes because modern slavery is much more effective. Make people take over debt and then pay them the minimum, barely enough to survive, and they will do whatever you tell them to do. You don’t need guard or weapon although a little bit of propaganda and no union, because union are communism and communism bad m’kay.
All forms of slavery
Then it never stopped, question is irrelevant.
As several people in this thread have pointed out, some forms of slavery do exist in the US. For example, prison labor, sex trafficking, and other forms of coerced labor.
However we do not have chattel slavery, where you can actively buy and sell other humans as property. I would be extremely surprised if that ever made a comeback.
I’m not at all convinced this is true. My kids - one of their friend’s families had a live in cook and nanny servant who they thought was likely a slave, and one of my friends said when she told her friend in passing she needed household help, the friend told her she could get her someone, that she could buy a person.
I think it’s more underground but no way is it gone, not even here. I wish I could believe it was gone.
What do you think allowed for it in the past?
Worse societies and tradition.
Our society is inherently better? What about it? What about it that prevents slavery?
You didn’t ask what prevents chattel slavery now. That would be the laws passed by victorious abolitionists. You asked why it happened in the past. It happened in the past because it had always existed and nobody had put a stop to it yet.
It’s still happens, in the world.
Are you trying to be difficult? Your original post was about the US. Every reply you make you change the context.
Well their username checks out.
Obviously. But it ain’t legal, mostly.
Slavery ended?
Literally the 13th amendment:
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.
The last slave as in chattel slave, a person who was owned by another, was freed in the 1940s. Passing a law alone does not end a practice. Hell even outside of prisons we have undocumented immigrants who often have no other choice but to allow themselves to be exploited for their labor or starve. We have immigrant children working in Tyson and Purdue chicken factories not only being paid less than minimum wage but also being severely injured.
“We are all given bathroom breaks at the same time and there are hundreds of us waiting to use them. There are only seven bathrooms,” she said. “They [Tyson] don’t care about the worker. They don’t care if we get sick.”
This was during covid at a Tyson chicken factory primarily staffed by migrants
The plight of Central American migrants in the meat industry was drawn into sharp focus last year when the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agency (Ice) carried out its largest raid in years on four poultry facilities in Mississippi. They arrested 680 undocumented workers but none of the companies, which included the multibillion dollar Koch Foods, faced any charges over employment practices.
“According to a report compiled by Eric Ruark, the director of research at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (Fair), as of 2006, only 27% of workers hired by agribusinesses are American citizens, 21% are green card holders, around 1% are part of the guest worker program … and a whopping 51% are unauthorized immigrants”.
And I cannot stress enough
“When workers arrived, they encountered a situation that a federal judge later called ‘wretched and loathsome’. They were packed in small houses with about twenty other people. Although it was the middle of winter, the houses had no heat, furniture, or blankets. One worker said that his house had no water, so he flushed the toilet with melted snow. They slept on the floor, where cockroaches crawled over them. At dawn, they rode to the plant in a dilapidated van whose seating consisted of wooden planks resting on cinder blocks. Exhaust fumes seeped in through holes in the floor” (Grabell).
Inside of that same plant over the course of seven years
since 2010, more than seven hundred and fifty processing workers have suffered amputations”
Case Farms has built its business by recruiting some of the world’s most vulnerable immigrants, who endure harsh and at times illegal conditions that few Americans would put up with”. And since many of the workers are undocumented, “the company has used their immigration status to get rid of vocal workers, avoid paying for injuries, and quash dissent”.
they were paid “around $2.25 for every thousand chickens
One-third of the Perdue plant’s overnight cleaning crew was made up of children, workers told The Times.
These are not just bad eggs. Our food industry is built on human blood
Even driving by some Tyson chicken factories with a camera will have a security car on your ass immediately asking you to delete the footage. I am not joking
That’s still slavery and involuntary servitude. And all that is needed for greedy, sick, psychotic monkeys to criminalize every little thing. Or selectively enforce criminalization to gain themselves a slave workforce. As they have done.
get em
Uh huh…
We’ve already got prison slavery and wage slavery running rampant, but I don’t think chattel slavery will make a comeback.
Chattle slavery? Certainly but slavery never left, it just changed
Prison.
There are lots of legal slaves in the US. They’re just in prisons so out of sight, out of mind. It’s constitutionally legal.
When the government ran most prisons many would pay them a couple of dollars an hour or something to make it seem more like work. Now many for profit prisons either pay pennies an hour or nothing at all, and many require you to work either directly or by making the meals low in nutrition or completely inedible so they have to buy their real food. And this isn’t like working by cleaning or laundry or whatever, this is making products that the prisons sell. Much of the stuff labeled “Made in America” is made by slaves.
There are also lots of illegal slaves hidden away. Mostly immigrants who couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars to apply for legal status before their visas ran out or who were carried across the border as babies and had to hide it their whole lives or other similar circumstances.
Slavery never disappeared anywhere.
As others have pointed out, slavery is still used as a punishment for prisoners in most states. The south in particular used/uses it to maintain slavery of african americans through selective enforcement of laws. Human trafficing is still a thing in the US even if it isn’t legal. And the way our economy works can be likened to a form of wage slavery where people often dont have a choice but to work for a specific employer. Especially if they’re undocumented. Apple was caught using the H1B visa program as a means of keeping immigrant employees effectively trapped there. The justice department fined them 25 million dollars. A slap on the wrist for exploiting vulnerable people.
But there already is slavery in US. look into unpaid prison labor
Look at what’s going on with prison labor. It’s already happening.
Is working 2 full time jobs just to be able to afford rent and utilities considered slavery?
I’m going to be real - I completely empathize with your sentiment, but I feel like comparing two jobs to actual slavery is off-base.
Is it fucked that you need to do that to survive? Absolutely, it’s completely horrible. The current capitalist hell scape we live in is just miserable, and there’s sadly no end in sight. It really seems like the 1% are trying their best to screw over the other classes. They even lie about the statistics of the situation to try to make it sound better!
However, even with all of that…
It’s no comparison to slavery as we know it. That’s more akin to what our (read: United States) prisons do - pay people almost nothing (if anything at all) to do brutal work for hours and hours.
Traditionally, even the current slavery-esque system that the prisons have is way better than any slavery beforehand - no one gave a shit if your foot was infected, if you were a slave, you had to work or you were beaten / killed in many cases. Prison also pays you most of the time (albeit for criminally small amounts of money).
There was no end in sight, no opportunity to apply for other jobs, you couldn’t say “fuck it, rent be damned” and quit and you damn-sure didn’t have luxuries such as a fridge or plumbing.
There are lots of places still like this today - North Korea, China (Xinjiang), dotted places across South America and Africa (whom I unfortunately cannot remember at this time), Saudi Arabia and the UAE come to mind. In North Korea, as well, you almost never make it out of their system and a lot of the time your family is taken in with you for your crimes. There are countless atrocities happening with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China, and there are undoubtedly prison camps in Russia holding Ukrainian POWs.
The idea of working two full-time jobs is not fun, but it’s not exactly on the same level as slave labor. At least you can quit a job and maybe end up homeless, where you likely have a shelter of some kind and / or can seek assistance of some variety. It’s not ideal, don’t get me wrong, but it’s better than outright being maimed and killed.
If you “quit” a job in a slave camp in pretty much any of the places I listed above, you’ll be tortured for days on end and left to die a horrific death (if you aren’t just outright shot). No one will come to help, and no one will care. It’s just not the same.
Yep. I feel like people comparing their jobs (that pay them and that they can leave) to slavery really downplays the severity of actual slavery.
See what I mean?
Read below.
In response to BiggestBulb, you need to learn about the prison pipeline and know just because the severity could be worse the implication is still the same. Choosing to be unemployed and homeless is a choice that is not a choice.
If you want to learn about the prison pipeline, quit your job tomorrow and take a bus as far away as you can afford. My past self did. You will learn how fast the system can sweep you up and you will learn your life now is exactly where society wants you to be.
I’ve already been homeless before lol, it wasn’t fun. I’m saying it’s just not the same extreme
You don’t sound like someone who has been homeless.
No, you are not a slave. 🙄
Let’s see. What are the alternatives?
…not having to work 2 full time jobs just to be able to afford rent and utilities? 🤨
I mean, are you free to live a happy healthy life if you chose to leave your current job(s)? Is there a reasonably achievable and accessible pathway to a higher salary job?
(Disclaimer: I’m mostly going to be talking about the U.S. here.)
I’m not even quite sure what you’re getting at here but a higher minimum wage is the obvious answer.
I also think you’re taking too narrow a view by thinking just about “jobs.” Consider the option of a UBI for instance.
There’s also “abolish the profit motive” and “to each according to need,” of course. But you did say “reasonably achievable and accessible”, which probably excludes this option for the moment.
But I still don’t feel like I’m answering quite the question you’re asking. Seems like your questions are aimed more at the reader personally rather than at “society”. So just answering literally what you asked, no I’m not free to live a happy healthy life if I choose to leave my current job (unless I were to get another job, of course.)
And I personally have a high-paying job and have the luxury of being picky about my working conditions beyond just whether I get enough money out of it to be able to eat and keep a roof over my head, so I’m not personally in need of a higher paying job. But that’s not the norm (in the U.S.) Not everyone can just get a higher-paying job. (In fact, it’s more the exception than the rule, I’d say.) And I’m very much in support of measures to improve conditions for most people.
Maybe what you’re getting at is that “if you can switch jobs, then it’s not slavery.” In which case we’re having a pointless argument of definition as to what qualifies as “slavery” and what doesn’t. What matters to me is that the current state of the U.S. is unacceptable. Using the term “slavery” to refer to it makes an impact rhetorically. Emma Goldman is known for having used the term “wage slave” in the 1920s.
(It honsestly gives me pause considering what victims of chattel slavery would think of me using the term “slavery” to refer to my high-paying desk job. I tend to use the term “gilded cage” instead.)
Whether having to work two jobs to afford food and rent qualifies as “slavery” or not, employment is not (often) voluntary, it enriches someone else much more than it enriches the employee, and it maintains societal inequality. It fulfills many of the same purposes that chattel slavery did/does for the powerful.
Sorry if you misunderstand. I’m not arguing the con I am only hoping to further the discussion because it is easy for people to brush off the idea of wage slavery and just say, “well you can quit your job so you’re not a slave” or “you can find a better one.”
I didn’t mean to challenge you but I appreciate your response.
Wage slavery exists because of the illusion of freedom. Its like you’re driving on an endless bridge with no gaurd rails. When you ask to stop because you’re dozing off you’re told you are free to drive off the edge anytime you want.
Yes? What kind of stupid question is this? I’d take to the streets.
Then take to the streets. Slavery is legal in prisons.
I have been. What have you been doing about it?
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if Cthulhu himself rose from Lake Michigan and started a slow trek south, gathering followers and accepting sacrifices as he goes.
You can see the bottom of lake Michigan on a clear day.
Superior he could hide in. That one is deep, though we still have nothing on lake Balakai
You’ve already got for-profit prisons in the US where inmates (slaves) are hired out.
What do we know about how a for-profit system works? That’s right - profit must always keep growing, or to put it another way, incentivising the process of creating criminals in order to increase the potential for a growing slave labour market is a growth industry.
Just because something doesn’t have the literal name ‘slavery’ attached to it, doesn’t mean it isn’t actually slavery in every respect that matters.
