Hacker News Reader

Comment by nycticorax | Hacker News Reader

Forced prison labor is very clearly not chattel slavery. And chattel slavery is what 99.9% of people mean when they talk about slavery in the US.

And I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but it seems to me that "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" qualifies "involuntary servitude", not "slavery". And in any case, lawyers like to err on the side of ruling out any possible misinterpretation, no matter how ridiculous.

If one was with a child, and the child saw a chain gang working, and the child asked "Are they slaves?", no sane person would say "yes" and leave it at that. You're being either daft or disingenuous, or both.

View on HN

> Forced prison labor is very clearly not chattel slavery.

But it is, if unpaid, slavery.

> And I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but it seems to me that "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" qualifies "involuntary servitude", not "slavery". And in any case, lawyers like to err on the side of ruling out any possible misinterpretation, no matter how ridiculous.

No. The distinction between the two is that involuntary servitude covers being forced to work while being paid or otherwise compensated; a slave, in contrast, doesn't get paid. Both are forced labor, but one is slavery. US prison labor may be one or the other, depending on payment.

(An English teacher would also sigh at you for your parsing of the clauses, I suspect. Your interpretation would require a different arrangement of the commas, i.e. Neither slavery COMMA nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted COMMA shall exist within the United States...)

> If one was with a child, and the child saw a chain gang working, and the child asked "Are they slaves?", no sane person would say "yes" and leave it at that.

Correct, because at a glance, you don't know if it's forced labor. Some states do voluntary work gangs; in some scenarios it's even considered a perk.

> No. The distinction between the two is that involuntary servitude covers being forced to work while being paid or otherwise compensated; a slave, in contrast, doesn't get paid.

Do you have a citation for this claim?

> > If one was with a child, and the child saw a chain gang working, and the child asked "Are they slaves?", no sane person would say "yes" and leave it at that.

> Correct, because at a glance, you don't know if it's forced labor. Some states do voluntary work gangs; in some scenarios it's even considered a perk.

What if the adult in the scenario happens to know that the prisoners are not being paid? Then you think the correct answer to the child's question is "Yes, those are slaves"? With no further qualification necessary?

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/219/219/

> The words involuntary servitude have a "larger meaning than slavery." "It was very well understood that, in the form of apprenticeship for long terms, as it had been practiced in the West India Islands, on the abolition of slavery by the English government, or by reducing the slaves to the condition of serfs attached to the plantation, the purpose of the article might have been evaded if only the word 'slavery' had been used."

If there wasn't a distinction between the two, the Amendment wouldn't need to mention both.

If I see forced unpaid laborers, I'm entirely comfortable deeming them slaves. (They'll probably learn about similar forms of slavery in history class; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome, for example. In current affairs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century)

Your original claim was that "slavery" means forced work without compensation, whereas "involuntary servitude" means forced work with or without compensation. Your citation doesn't justify this claim. It not just that there's a distinction, it's the nature of the distinction that I'm disputing.

> If I see forced unpaid laborers, I'm entirely comfortable deeming them slaves.

Yeah, you're comfortable with it because you've redefined "slavery" to mean whatever you want it to mean. But if you did a survey of native English speakers, and asked them if unpaid workers on a chain gang were slaves, how many do you think would say "yes", without qualification? I would be shocked if the answer were more than 20%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com