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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.
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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.
Slavery already exists in the US in various forms, and in greater numbers than prior to the Civil War, but no I would not be surprised if the right wingers legalize slavery again, or if Gilead/Texas tries first.
Either way fuck the Confederate wannabes, we should smash them now so we don’t have to do it yet again later, which is what Grant failed to do during the Reconstruction era.
Sherman was right!
Slavery is currently legal a the federal level for incarcerated people as that exception was carved out in the 13th Amendment. That is pretty much maxed out in its current state through disproportionately incarcerating minorities, and is likely to be the primary reason that the US has such a ridiculously high incarceration rate.
What is your definition of slavery that would mean there is more slavery now than before the civil war?
Well there’s absolutely a lot of real and actual slavery across the country, from domestic servants who are being held against their will, to sex slaves, and of course the numbers scale up with our population. So our population during the civil war was 31+ million, with close to 4 million of that being slaves, now we have 331+ million people, if you combine the instances of domestic and indentured servitude with sexual slavery, then add in those wrongfully in the prison system it scales to being much more than the sub 4 million in slavery during the civil war.
I know a lot of people would want to say “but the prison system is prisoners who committed crimes” but a lot of people are in prison because of failed justice, or on poverty based offenses, some of which compile with other petty offenses. Now also another caveat is that prison work isn’t usually compulsory, it’s normally voluntary, but one can argue that it’s the prison that has the leverage over these people volunteering or not.
Overall these statistics aren’t easy to calculate because modern day slavers want to hide and obfuscate their crimes, but it’s there, it exists, and it exists in places you may not expect, like the next time you’re sitting in a park in Manhattan consider the fact that one of the many domestic workers present may in fact be enslaved against their will, and this could be said in LA, Miami, Atlanta, anywhere in the US.
And even if someone is in the prison system for entirely correct reasons, forcing them to work is still slavery. I don’t care if they’re the most guilty awful person ever, if they need to be put in prison then put them in prison. That’s the purpose of prison.
Trying to get economic benefit out of holding people in prison is not a slippery slope, it’s a slippery cliff. The moment you try to justify it for anyone you’re opening the door to a moral disaster.
But let’s be objective with this, most of prison work is voluntary, and the desire to do something, anything, sometimes gets the best of us and due to that we’ll do the volunteering, it’s important to make that distinction, especially when I’ve been there and done that.
Now the obvious differences are prisons like Angola in Louisiana, which still has the same chaingang that they were depicted to have in movies decades behind us, there’s no voluntary work there, those are prison work camps/concentration camps, and are tantamount to slavery, if not outright slavery, and are violent as hell, and these types of prisons can be found all across the American South, but especially along the Gulf Coast.
“You can work and spend your entire pittance on ramen noodles, or you can go stir-crazy in your cell and eat stewed cardboard” is a voluntary choice only in the most strictly pedantic sense.
That’s being a bit Hyperbolic, and these aren’t the types of prisons or jails where you’re stuck in a cell all day, that’s your misconception, the only people who are locked up like that are the ones that have proven themselves too dangerous to be around others, or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be when our prison system is working correctly, and the only prisons where that’s consistently their prison existence is the SuperMax prisons, because again, those people are too dangerous to let roam without supervision.
Mostly it’s just a chance to get out from behind the walls and the fences, sure they’d rather be free, but I’m sure we’d all rather they not do shut that gets them put in prison, and regardless of your feelings towards prisons people who commit crimes, real crimes, belong there, or some form of prison that emphasizes rehabilitation.
or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be when our prison system is working correctly
Opinions on whether it’s “working correctly” is likely going to vary depending on whether you’re running a factory that depends on prison labor. Right now I think those factory owners would agree that it’s working correctly.
And you are certain there is no reprisal against anyone that refuses?
Most guards could not give a shit less, they’re there to do their jobs and go home, so if you’re not going to volunteer some other person will, or they’ll just take whomever did volunteer. Sure you might run into some dickhead guard that demands it but that guard is just a symptom of our broken system and is most likely operating in a manner that would get them in trouble if the right people are notified.
But as I said to another person who replied to me that then you have prisons like Angola, which are basically just concentration camps, they staff the place with brutal guards purposely to keep the place viciously violent, and every single one of the prisons like Angola should be shut down with the staff prosected.
So it really depends on the prison, but the majority are of the more mellow variety, although overpopulation makes the more mellow prisons drastically less mellow.
The Private Prisons have contracts to fulfill, your optimistic belief that folks all volunteer is laughable.
I have no idea who’s downvoting your comments or why, you’re providing a perspective most of us nerds don’t have.
If you aren’t accounting for the change in population and you’re just comparing the estimated number of slaves, then you are definitely correct. However, I think its probably better to measure what percentage of the population is made up of slaves.
I agree, but that’s also what I’m trying to say is that the natural scale of the population increase will still scale out to be a higher slavery total than back then, but that’s total numbers, the percentages would be vastly different, like during the civil war era slaves were about 9.6% of the population of the US, but because of slavery not being tracked so closely now we couldn’t get an accurate total for slavery in the modern era, and there would be nitpicking about what counts as slavery and what does not.
Always loved this logic.
There’s more people enslaved today than there ever has been in the history of the world
No no, let’s not think about it that way -
The percentage of people that are slaves is roughly the same or decreasing 🥰🥰🥰
Obviously there are going to be more total enslaved people now, it scales with the population. The problem with looking at it that way is that it doesn’t actually tell you if the situation is improving. All it tells you is that there are way more people now. That’s why you look at a percentage. That will tell you how bad the problem was, how much better its gotten, and how much better it needs to get.
I’m not trying to argue that everything is ok because a smaller percentage of people are enslaved now. A percentage is simply the more useful method of measuring how common slavery is and comparing it to different times.
As well as the domestic slavery that DigitalTraveler42 mentions, we’ve off-shored a lot of slavery.
Companies serving US markets set up their pricing in a way that encourages producers to use slaves or they buy from the lowest price and either don’t ask questions or ask questions after the order is filled. Coffee, chocolate, tea, textiles and garment production all involve slave labour at the tacit request of large companies that are often based in the US.
The cost benefits of slavery are factored into a lot of our food and clothes. That’s an important part of our economy that we can’t separate out just because we’ve set up supply chains with deniability in mind.
Sherman was a psychopathic mass murderer. Look up his slaughter of American Indians. He was a terrible person who was pointed at even worse people for once and set loose. Don’t idealize him.
But there already is slavery in US. look into unpaid prison labor
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We never got rid of slavery in the US. We merely shifted cost of ownership. Quite successfully. The laws have been advanced and tweaked to make everyone a potential criminal, especially if a minority. Prison labor is absolutely legal. The prison system is mostly privatized and for-profit. Healthcare is tied to employment, with dental care (a foundational element of good health) often being an add-on to employer-provided health insurance.
Stop the country, I want to get off.
Refs:
- Hacking of the American Mind by Robert Lustig
- New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
- Evil Geniuses by Kurt Andersen
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.
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 never went away.
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.
Perhaps if we consider slavery as more of a spectrum, like we do other kinds of abuse, then economic coercion still fits the definition.
One person being denied medical care, working inhumane lengths of time in hard labor for almost no money, being unable to access different forms of work and being beaten is clearly slavery, as you’ve identified. But that doesn’t mean the person who is experiencing all of that, but only without being beaten, is not experiencing slavery. It just makes it a (possibly) less severe form of slavery.
If the key difference between a fast food worker living in rural wherever who can’t access healthcare, doesn’t have a choice to move or change jobs etc. and a slave is immediate physical violence… perhaps we need to revisit the definition of “slavery” or of “employment” or both. Dying a slow death from homelessness and poverty due to systemic inequity isn’t actually a hugely better deal than a fast death at the hands of one person. In some cases it may even be worse because the suffering lasts much longer.
You assume that people who are unemployed can access help and resources, I’m not sure that the reality on that widely reflects people’s experiences, depending on their location.
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. 🙄
Yes it is because as soon as you stop working you will most likely die an unpleasant death from povery, violence, preventable disease linked to malnutrition etc… If you don’t have a choice, then it’s slavery.
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.
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.
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.
Look at what’s going on with prison labor. It’s already happening.
Outside of prisons, you mean?
Now that you ask…
Instead of giving people free food and housing in prisons, I imagine mandatory work sentences for minor offences. Littering? 1 year of mandatory work. Why it’s black people disproportionately getting work time? I don’t know… must be in their genes or something.
The problem with mandatory work is that someone will benefit from that work and so it’ll be in their interest that more people be condemned to it. It would need to be organized in a way that companies didn’t profit directly from increased convictions.
I’m guessing it was less of a suggestion and more of a guess as to “What’s the most probable way that slavery sneaks back into society.”
And I agree with them. Jails are already overloaded and private companies are making bank on it. I could see them offering mandatory unpaid work in lieu of jail time. Of course where you have to work would be determined by which company has the highest bid.
someone will benefit from that work
That’s the whole point…?
Also, gosh, there sure are a lot of repeat offenders in there. What a coincidence. It’s almost like prisons do the opposite of reforming the people that are sucked into the system, or like once you’ve got a criminal record there’s a lot fewer non-crime options for you once you’re back out on the street.
It’s not free, you get billed for it upon release. Combine that with diminished employment opportunities and you’ve got a recipe for repeat offenders. It’s slavery but with extra steps for plausible deniability, which is still slavery.
Apparently this didn’t hit your news feed over the last few days.
