Would you be surprised at all if there was a re-emergence of slavery in the United States?

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

source1 source2 source3

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.

Uh huh...

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.

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.

Worse societies and tradition.

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.

...not having to work 2 full time jobs just to be able to afford rent and utilities? 🤨

Then it never stopped, question is irrelevant.

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…?

I have been. What have you been doing about it?

Yeah and those companies are doing SO much better than Nestle, right??? Fucking moron, the US ON AVERAGE is cool with it, but sure, jump on my one generalization and try to minimize the actual issue.

It's the internet. It has ruined our ability to socialize healthily.

The Bible condones slavery. And many slave holders invoked the Bible to justify slavery.

From Frederick Douglas' first autobiography:

Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

Sure is and good luck changing the constitution

You don't really have those powers anymore. Maybe what Capitalizm was before wasn't capitalizm. You maybe can take your skills elsewhere is a nice thought but it really is just that. A nice thought and nothing to do with reality. Everyone is homeless and skills and education don't hold a sack of shit these days.

You may have been right back in the day but right now you're literally blind. Shit is obvious now and you can't see it. If we live long enough it will be finished off to be exactly what I'm pointing at. You're looking at my finger and telling me I'm wrong but you can't see the tsunami incoming that I'm pointing at.