I'm going to disagree, but then again, I have literally seen a black mother and her 5 children sleeping in dirt holes in the ground under floorboards covered in found plastic with no actual roof over their heads in an inhospitable environment. I have seen the working and living conditions of other Native Americans who are treated no better than slaves EVEN in this time. There were slaves who lived better than some of my own brothers working LESS hours. People really do not realize how bad some people STILL have it in the US and the world for that matter. You see these shacks in this film? There are STILL people forced to living in these conditions in the country, I went to school with kids who our bus picked up from houses JUST like this, or even worse like Esthers.Fun fact about Australia, free settlers actually outnumbered convicts quite significantly. But even then, convicts would come as indentured labour, not slavery. Indigenous Australians would be somewhere in-between (i.e. not technically slaves, but had wages withheld). Plus, there's blackbirding.
Though to be frank, Australia is among the last places I think of when it comes to slavery, and this isn't out of a white blindfold view of history, it's more the fact that if you look at the history of the world, you find slavery EVERYWHERE. I'm not even sure why "economic slavery" is an argument that 's even being used. If I owned another human being as, say, a sex slave, I might not be making a dent on the economy, but it doesn't make my actions any less heinous. And if we're applying this on the level of nations and empires, so, to list a few, the United States used slaves to grow cotton, the Ottoman Empire used slaves to work in salt mines, various Arab caliphates used slaves for harems and soldiers, and the Aztecs used slaves for human sacrifice. Does slavery become worse if it's used to fund the economy?
Also, even if we're doubting the scale of slavery in numerous societies...
Yogi Adityanath is right: Taj Mahal was built by sweat of Indian workers, but it remains edifice of exploitation
There is no doubt that BJP MLA Sangeet Som exposed his poor knowledge of history by describing the Taj Mahal as a “blot on Indian culture”. In response, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath has reiterated his government’s commitment to not only safeguard and preserve one of the “wonders...www.firstpost.com
Not saying any of that's ideal, but I can't call it slavery. And even if it is "wage slavery," I'd still rank that above slavery, serfdom, or indentured labour.
Granted, just writing that is kind of like saying it's better to eat dogshit rather than catshit, but at the very least, there's a potential 'out' from such positions that the other forms of labour I mentioned above wouldn't allow.
We still literally have people who have as little as slaves, or sometimes even less. Not because they don't work hard. They work harder than most, just this is how bad people are paid these days. Not having employers beat you , rape you and kill you is a plus, but if you are suffering and die anyway because of how little you are paid, the end result isn't much better. Having poverty conditions on par with slavery due to not being paid a living wage isn't much of an improvement here.
Slavery wasn't "ONLY BAD" because of the worst abusers. We aren't talking about the " worst offenders" as examples of why slavery was bad, Even the slaves who were treated well were still slaves and had little to no wealth. Slavery was bad because of the way they forced people to live "beneath" others, they were viewed as "less than" others and undeserving of the same basic access to human decency. We still have that by forcing people into poverty and desperation to provide for themselves and their families via wage slavery. Not paying people a living wage forces people to not be able to even afford a roof over their heads or food on their tables. Many never are never able to buy new clothes or shoes or other basic necessities due to the severity of this.
With the amount of wealth in this world, there really is no excuse for the conditions they are imposing upon the workers who are doing the work that is creating the wealth for others to accumulate but being denied the ability to do so themselves.
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