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If you are describing various forms of debt bondage (as practiced in India and other such places), I agree, particularly when most debt bondage involves beating those who try to quit.

This problem more or less does not exist in the west, with rare exceptions like sex trafficking from eastern Europe (or from rural areas here in India). Most people using the term "wage slavery" are not restricting it to such situations - they are instead using it to describe people who might need to reduce their consumption to globally rich levels (e.g., $20k/year in the US) if they quit their job. In fact, I've never heard anyone use the term "wage slavery" to describe real labor abuses such as what you hint at.

Illegal immigrants in Western countries can easily be led into situations that may be described as "debt bondage" or "wage slavery." They do not have legal recourses, yet are afforded a place as a "hidden" workforce of temps, day laborers, migrant workers, and sweatshop employees, with the threat of deportation used to ensure dependence.

Guest workers also tend to receive discriminatory treatment, even though they have a legal status. The Bracero program in the United States was critiqued along these lines, and the situation today has not improved in a real sense, as illegal immigrants continue to be used in similar ways for similar work.

These situations share a common thread with the original article in that class is created through legal status, and subsequently magnified by abuses. Enslaved workers are blocked from using resources that could get them out of their situation.

There are examples in these comments. This quote is apt: “This is what happens when we don’t pay attention.”

How much attention do you have to pay?

You seem to have a dualistic view on this. Your definition of "bad" is a salt field slave being beaten or debt bondage and "not bad" is anything "better" than that. It's a low bar to set.

I agree, salt field slaves are worse off than McDonalds slaves; McDonalds slaves have the "freedom" to work for Burger King after all. There's also a slippery slope. In many 3rd world countries, people have the "freedom" to leave their farms to work in factories with poor conditions.

I define the word "slave" as someone who has freedom taken away by another person or a system. Some people are in more slavery than others. The salt field workers have very little freedom. The McDonalds workers have a little more freedom, but you or I would not want to be one.

I notice that you are a wealthy white male financial trader. It must be nice to be in a position where you have such freedom. Please have compassion for people with significantly less freedom than you, even if you don't see them as slaves. People are more than our abstractions.

Many people work hard:

You know where it ends Yo, it usually depends On where you start - Everlast

http://genius.com/Everlast-what-its-like-lyrics/

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There are also more unpaid slaves today than any other time in history.

https://www.freetheslaves.net/page.aspx?pid=301

I merely said that by using the word slave to describe voluntary employment, you desensitize people to it. Without reading the article, I cant tell if the article is about forced labor or just some activist whining about how bad their mcjob is.

FYI I live in one of those third world countries. I still reserve the word slave for people who are not permitted to quit.

> I merely said that by using the word slave to describe voluntary employment, you desensitize people to it.

I feel the opposite. We can look at these horrible conditions and say, "thank goodness it doesn't happen here in America" and "at least we aren't that bad". Our sense of responsibility is wiped clean because "we are better than them".

> FYI I live in one of those third world countries. I still reserve the word slave for people who are not permitted to quit.

Treating slavery as a rare anomaly encourages abuses that aren't considered "slavery". We then complain that people are "whining"; they should be grateful because they aren't "slaves". Disrespecting the "complainers" results in the "complainers" becoming marginalized and censored.

Some racial minorities have a long history of being marginalized and censored. Just because black people are no longer unpaid slaves does not wipe the slate clean and make everything ok.

The dichotomy is even stronger in India, so maybe that desensitizes the nuances of income inequality in 1st world countries. However, I don't know of too many who would want to live in poverty working in a McJob.

There's also a malaise of people who work in relatively high paying jobs they don't enjoy. This addiction to money & convenience motivates people to do strange things and to view others & the planet in an unhealthy way.

Your argument is based on the fallacy of the excluded middle. Something can be bad without being slavery. If the high paying job with money/convenience addiction were really so terrible, why do you need to fallaciously compare it to plantation slavery to make that case?

Also, talking about inequality completely masks the issue. India has lower inequality than the US. If you want to talk about desperately needing a job, you need to either exclude 1/6 of humanity or else recognize that the lack of rich people doesn't make open defecation more fun.

> If the high paying job with money/convenience addiction were really so terrible, why do you need to fallaciously compare it to plantation slavery to make that case?

I'm correctly, not fallaciously, using the word slave. Words are patterns with fuzziness.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slave

> One who has lost the power of resistance; one who surrenders to something.

I chose the word slave, because it highlights a pattern of people being marginalized and losing their freedom. It's slavery in a different form.

Think of boiling a frog with small changes in temperature. If we see words with fixed lines, like a chained slave in the 1800s south, then we fail to see people systemically losing their freedom due to economic inequality & being on the wrong side of leverage.

> Also, talking about inequality completely masks the issue. India has lower inequality than the US. If you want to talk about desperately needing a job, you need to either exclude 1/6 of humanity or else recognize that the lack of rich people doesn't make open defecation more fun.

A False Dilemma; that it's either income inequality or everybody is poor. We have more than enough resources to ensure that nobody lives in poverty. Economic competition & pooling of capital has fundamental issues, particularly with inequality & environmental problems. Cooperation, transparency, & decentralization seems likely to yield better results.

We live in a world where many people are required to waste time working in a job that they don't enjoy. Consumerism is deemed "essential" to the social well being, yet consumerism encourages environmental problems & social marginalization. Instead, we could be working to improve the environment & giving everybody freedom to act on their desires. Instead we celebrate the rich, shame the poor, consume, create wars, plunder the Earth.

"Put it another way. Imagine you simply magically eliminated all forms of chattel slavery, but then immediately put all those magically freed ex-slaves in deep debt to their ex-owners (with heavy interest), and left them just as socially isolated as they are right now, and then gave them a chance to either take their chances and try to find a job somewhere else, or let them work off their debts to their ex-owners. Are they in a better position than they were before? Yes. Are they in anything remotely close to a good position? No. "

I don't think you understand the difference between voluntarily entering debt, and being forced into a situation against your will. Whether they are in a "good position" or not is irrelevant so long as they weren't forced into it. We all make stupid mistakes, and we have to live with them. Sometimes those mistakes are huge, and we will spend the rest of our lives "repaying" or fixing the damage.

Though, it's different with the mentally handicapped. They're not able to make informed decisions for themselves, and could quite easily (and voluntarily) get into huge debt. That is why they need to be protected by their family, which we are sorely neglecting by increasingly injecting the state as a surrogate parental figure when the parents(or family) are available and it is not necessary.

Wage slavery does not imply free choice.

Here's an article about people who had their arms hacked off with axes when they tried to leave their bonded labour.

http://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27486450

Doesn't sound like they agreed to or chose to have their hands chopped off, though. They were tricked, kidnapped and held for ransom from a family too poor to pay anything. So I don't see what you're getting at?

Wikipedia has a good write up about wage-slavery, if you're curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

You seem to be saying that people who voluntarily enter into bonded slavery need to take responsibility for the choice they made. You appeared in your comment to suggest that bonded labour is not actual slavery - but it is.

http://www.antislavery.org/english/slavery_today/bonded_labo...

People do not freely enter into arrangements to become wage slaves. You said they did.

No, he's pointing out that bonded slavery is not the same as wage slavery, as the element of free choice/freedom from harm doesn't exist in bonded slavedy.

I see the equivocation of suffering between bonded and 'wage' slavery to be incredibly disingenuous. Working at McDonald's doesn't make you a slave in the same sense as a person who has their limbs cut off for trying to escape, and to insist that 'wage slavery' is comparable is disturbingly detached from reality.

Wage Slavery is not the same as bonded slavery.

Wage slavery is usually used to describe the situation where a person's wage only just pays their living expense, so they are forced to keep the job because if they lose it they will be unable to survive.

They still have free choice though, in that no one is forcing them to work.

That's quite different to "real" slavery where there is some kind of involuntary nature. In the case of bonded slavery a person is forced to work until their "loan" is paid off.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

The link you supply clearly says that wage slaves do not have freedom to leave the work they're doing. They are forced to continue working, just not always with threats of violence.

Most "wage slaves" have no freedom. They're not free to chose the work they do, nor to control how that work is performed, nor to leave if working conditions are unacceptable. http://www.antislavery.org/english/slavery_today/domestic_wo...

You appear to be saying that "wage slavery" is clearly separate from "slavery". I am saying that there are considerable overlap between them and that most people who are "wage slaves" are just "slaves".

Your link clearly talks about forced and bonded labor. People in those arrangements are compelled to keep working by another person.

In wage slavery a person is compelled to keep working by their bodily needs. That is sad, and I would love to see the day when it isn't the case. But it isn't the same thing as being compelled by another person.

It's quite disingenuous to argue my link says that wage slaves do not have freedom to leave the work they're doing. Put in context my link says this:

"Wage slavery refers to a situation where a worker's livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate."

To make it clear: under wage slavery a person is free to leave, but must immediately find another job.

If we ignore those of us who have made their FU money, most of us differ from that situation only by degree: if we leave a job we have to find another one. Perhaps not immediately, but for many it is with a degree of urgency. Some would argue that makes us all wage slaves to some degree, and that may well be true.

But to say that is the same thing as those in actual, real chattel slavery, bonded labor or similar diminishes the real outrage we should feel at their lack of basic rights.

"Wage slavery," every time I have seen it used, is used to describe any situation where someone trades their own labor for some payment other than the complete product of that labor.