Slavery ended?
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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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
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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.
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But there already is slavery in US. look into unpaid prison labor
Prisoners are the slaves... Slavery has never stopped in the USA just changed form
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.
Slavery never went away.
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.
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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.
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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.
Look at what's going on with prison labor. It's already happening.
Outside of prisons, you mean?
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.
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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.
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As others have pointed out, there is still slavery in America. Wage slavery is slavery. Tying healthcare access to employment doesn't help.
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.
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Slavery has been legal in the United States since 1789.
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
Yes? What kind of stupid question is this? I'd take to the streets.
Yes?
I would be shocked, appalled, but not surprised. At this point the only thing that would surprise me about the US is if they actually somehow do something that fixes their backwards country.
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Slavery never disappeared anywhere.
I know people talk about prisoners and wage slaves, but the United States is also participating in, and profiting from, child slavery as well; it just doesn't happen in the states. Just take a look at where your chocolate comes from, if it's Hershey, Mars, or Nestle, it was probably harvested by someone under 15 who has never even tasted chocolate. And the US is just.... cool with it.
https://foodispower.org/human-labor-slavery/slavery-chocolate/
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