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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

One reason is I almost never hear from this friend since his relocation to another part of the world. Another is they have enough issues going on, personal issues requiring a lot of work, and being told they are a slave owner would not help.

Perhaps most importantly my friend is not the direct slave owner, if that is indeed the relationship. It's my friend's dad, a guy I've barely even met. Perhaps if he was around, and caning her as I walked into the kitchen, I would have said something, who knows? But I was receiving his hospitality through a third party, and I am a foreigner to their country and customs.

Did you ever read the article and wonder why Billy or his family didn't do anything? They probably felt it was so alien they didn't know what to do.

You also gotta ask yourself, if you owned a slave, why you would allow that slave to be the only attendant when a western family comes through town?

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You understand that you are now complicit in her abuse, yes? You understand that you are an accomplice to this crime?

> You understand that you are now complicit in her abuse, yes? You understand that you are an accomplice to this crime?

FFS, you literally know next to nothing about the situation. Why do you feel like you're in a position to self righteously adjudicate him as being a criminal? None of us, not even lordnacho himself, know enough about his friend's housekeeper to legitimately make claims like that (or casually throw around terms like slave).

Seriously, the housekeeper's situation may not be too far off from the archetypal startup employee working 18 hour days and sleeping under his desk. None of us know, and none of us should claim to know.

>Seriously, the housekeeper's situation may not be too far off from the archetypal startup employee working 18 hour days and sleeping under his desk. None of us know, and none of us should claim to know.

Do you really believe that some 23 year old fresh out of college programmer working 18 hours days by choice in hopes of either a significant payoff or at least experience that will anyways lead to a very well compensated job is at all similar to a women who is sleeping on a mat in the kitchen of an empty house full of empty rooms who is then woken up every morning by a phone call explicitly designed to be demeaning so that she can start her menial, low payoff, worthless experience work?

> in hopes of either a significant payoff or at least experience that will anyways lead

You're moving the goalposts. It's not about whether they have equivalent opportunities, it's about whether they're slaves. The overworked-and-sleeping-on-a-mat-programmer and the overworked-and-sleeping-on-mat-maid may both simply have paid jobs with shitty bosses. People here are jumping to the conclusion that being worked hard + sleeping on a mat = slavery, when clearly it doesn't.

What about the slave?

I think there might be some conflation between this story and the article posted. We and the OP don't actually know if the person was enslaved by forced labour.

All they know is that they slept on a matt in the kitchen.

If they were being paid adequately, I would not call it slavery. Poor labour practice, certainly, and distasteful in the extreme but not the same thing as forced labour and bondage.

> I think there might be some conflation between this story and the article posted.

Yeah. My sense is people are angry at what the OP described, and their anger has clouded their judgment. They're twisting ambiguous stories like lordnacho's into a version of the OP's, so they can play-act their sense of righteous superiority.

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