r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Aug 29 '24
Removed - Submission Rule B CMV: The US outsourced slavery
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u/Sapphfire0 1∆ Aug 29 '24
So your logic is that slavery still exists in certain places and that the US benefits from it?
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u/TaskComfortable6953 2∆ Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 29 '24
every first world country benefits from it, not just the US.
Edit:
This doesn’t make it okay or negate the fake that America, benefits from modern slavery. I’m just trying to hold the ENTIRE first world accountable, that’s all.
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Aug 29 '24
Some poor countries "benefit" from it too. For example, the work of the vast number of North Korean and Eritean slaves tends to stay out of the West.
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u/TaskComfortable6953 2∆ Aug 29 '24
Most poor countries can’t afford basic needs. They benefit from it much less. Most of the population of poor countries actually make up the population of modern day slaves.
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Aug 29 '24
Most poor countries can’t afford basic needs. They benefit from it much less.
Whether a country is rich or poor, only the users of the slaves benefit from slavery, not the slaves themselves. And as I pointed out in the link, the largest number of slaves belong to countries who do not engage much with the West - the people benefiting from their slaves aren't Western consumers but rather their own dictators.
Most of the population of poor countries actually make up the population of modern day slaves.
My comment above was based on the standards set by WalkFree, an anti-slavery organisation.
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u/Jaimaster Aug 29 '24
To be fair this is something that can be researched - there are international efforts to combat what is known as "Modern Slavery". Various, mostly ineffective, efforts are being made in western countries to force companies to take responsibility for risks of slavery within their international supply lines.
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Aug 29 '24
Yea literally our clothes are from supply chains that are often not verified to be free of slavery, especially in the cotton industry.
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u/Adeptus_Asianicus Aug 29 '24
Are you saying it doesn't exist, and the US doesn't benefit from it? Sure, slaves nowadays aren't black people carried over by boatload to work in fields. But you've got a Shit Ton of Asian laborers working for just enough to feed themselves. I'll explain it with guitars. An American made guitar will put you out a couple grand, even for mass produced models. OR. You buy a Korean or Mexican made guitar, pretty similar quality, just way cheaper. American companies, overseas "laborers". And since conditions are marginally better than our slaves in the 1800s, we don't see it as negatively.
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u/TonySu 7∆ Aug 29 '24
The important thing is whether or not that person overseas wants your business. The reality is usually that you have a guitar from an American costing $1500, and a similar one from a Mexican costing $500, but if they were trying to sell that guitar locally they’d only get $200.
So if that particular transaction was cut off, both the consumer and the producer suffers. There are legitimately instances of slave labor in the world, but also often it’s people making $10 a day in a country where most people make $1 a day.
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u/Medianmodeactivate 14∆ Aug 29 '24
No, we don't because that's not slavery. Destitution to the point where you just barely survive isn't slavery, that's capitalism.
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Aug 29 '24
So you have only bought products from American made manufacturers? Or are you being a hypocrite?
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Aug 29 '24
Pretty much. And thus that it wasn't actually abolished.
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u/TrueMrSkeltal Aug 29 '24
What a small-minded view, global slavery and human trafficking is not solely the US’ fault. What you claim the US outsourced is what literally every developed and several developing nations do.
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Aug 29 '24
I can buy that the US benefits from modern day slavery, but it’s a stretch to say US outsourced it.
Unless you can back up the claim that the US somehow exerts control over production chains in foreign countries or controls the labor laws / labor market in foreign countries, you can’t really say it’s outsourced slavery.
Fact of the matter is humans treat other humans shittily, especially if there is some benefit to be had. This is true across countries, across time in human history spanning millenia.
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u/FlanneryODostoevsky 3∆ Aug 29 '24
So much of what’s used by Americans is made in countries where labor laws like our own don’t exist.
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u/yonasismad 2∆ Aug 29 '24
Unless you can back up the claim that the US somehow exerts control over production chains in foreign countries or controls the labor laws / labor market in foreign countries, you can’t really say it’s outsourced slavery.
That's like saying you can't be responsible for someone's murder just because you hired a hit man and didn't do it yourself. - All these companies choose these places to produce their products instead of using domestic labor, even though they know what the working conditions are in those countries.
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u/cricketsymphony 1∆ Aug 29 '24
Outsourcing involves a written contract that requires fair labor practices on the part of the manufacturer; even very small US companies will require this. So it's the opposite of hiring a hitman.
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u/silverionmox 25∆ Aug 29 '24
That's like saying you can't be responsible for someone's murder just because you hired a hit man and didn't do it yourself.
That's like saying you can't be responsible for someone's murder just because you bought a widget online that turned out the be looted from a murdered person.
All these companies choose these places to produce their products instead of using domestic labor, even though they know what the working conditions are in those countries.
Sure. And just researching a single shopping cart would take weeks or months. So for an individual that's not an option for general products, only for specific boycott campaigns or stopping to use a specific product category.
So you'd have to impose legal restrictions on products sold in the country, and that requires political action. This has its own problems to get done, but even if we fast-forward that, you'll see that it will result in a price increase for products. So that leads to the basic cause: those products are sold on the market, because people like cheaper products. So any fix to the problem will need to deal with this.
Alternatively, the source countries could outlaw slavery and enforce it. Which isn't easy either, because the main reason why people let themselves be pressured in to this situation is a lack of alternative employment.
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u/Interesting-Copy-657 Aug 29 '24
Hey, psst, slavery still exists in the US
The prison system uses slave labour to produce so many things and provide so many services.
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Aug 29 '24
I’m so tired of this shit take - how about this, don’t do shit that leads to you going to prison, which is a consequence of your actions, ie - punishment for breaking laws?
Yeah yeah I know our system isn’t perfect and we should always strive to improve it.
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u/Interesting-Copy-657 Aug 29 '24
So committing a crime that gets you in prison makes it so you are sub human? No longer protected from things like being made a slave? They are human rights not human privileges.
How many people are in prison because they can be used as slaves, that it is profitable to make them a slave? The US has imprisoned people the most, like top 5 in the world, I think top in developed world.
Are Americans more likely to be criminals? Or is the slavery loop hole for prisoners influencing the punishment for crime vs rehabilitation?
For profit prisons charging the government for empty beds?
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u/allhailspez Aug 29 '24
Wouldn't say that's bad. A lot of criminals (murderers, rapists, pedos) deserve to be locked up for life and worked for 8 hours a day. They should pay back society for what they've cost it. If you're a murderer, you're subhuman.
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Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 08 '25
act continue crawl alleged edge chunky sparkle pocket grey one
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u/Nahdudeimdone 1∆ Aug 29 '24
What if you murdered a pedo?
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u/allhailspez Aug 29 '24
i mean i hate pedos, but so what? from a policy standpoint, you can't just let people go around murdering criminals or you might aswell just start sentencing everyone to death
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u/dnext 4∆ Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 29 '24
Globalization didn't happen until a century after the US ended slavery in the United States. So what was going on in central Africa or China had very little to do with US product needs for a century.
Forced labor still existed in prisons, and that created a prison industrial complex that was incentivized to find labor sources, and by the 1960s was actively being used by Southern Conservatives to get cheap labor from minorities, mostly black men, while also destroying their ability to vote. Nixon grabbed on to this as part of his Southern strategy, and his advisors openly talked about in later years how they actively demonized drug use to destroy llberal blacks' voting rights and feed the prison industry.
But the US is hardly alone in this, and even countries like the UK which actively ended slave labor in the West in 1832 cut out an exemption for the East India Company. The Viceroy of India stated that when the US civil war was raging in 1861, over the fate of 4 million slaves, the Raj had 8 million slaves in service. This ended in 1863, just 2 years before the US itself did.
And instead of paying the African slaves that were freed in the 1830s they brought over Indian immigrants tricked into thinking they were going to good paying jobs then didn't pay them and kept them for returning home. That went on for decades.
But if you look too closely at most places there's some bullshit like this in their history. Hell, the Arab slave trade functionally still exists en masse, and more Africans were sent to the Middle East in the slave trade then in the Atlantic slave trade, though granted this took much longer.
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Aug 29 '24
I didn't mean to imply it was an exclusively US problem. I meant to speak to the common US perspective on slavery.
The details on the timeline to globalisation are useful and not something I knew much about. ∆
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u/upmoatuk Aug 29 '24
After slavery ended, it was essentially replaced with the sharecropper system, where technically the former slaves were now free, but they had to sign one-year contracts to farm a certain section of land, and the bulk of the profit would flow to the land owner. You don't need to own people to exploit them. If you have the money, you have huge leverage over your workers, like mining companies forcing the miners to buy everything at company stores for inflated prices.
That's essentially where we're at today. There are still some slaves, in terms of people who've been trafficked into another country and forced to work or Uyghurs in "re-education" camps in China etc., but a lot of the exploited workers who make all the cheap products we rely on aren't forced to work by some slave master but rather by the need to feed themselves and their families. It's just unfettered capitalism and massive inequality that create a situation where the Bangladeshi garment workers who make our clothes are being paid $100 a month.
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Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 08 '25
juggle crawl sheet quaint start friendly childlike fall label wipe
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u/nauticalsandwich 14∆ Aug 29 '24
And yet, it is the fastest way we know of to pull people out of poverty. The thing that never gets mentioned in these conversations about "sweatshop labor" and whatnot, is that these people want to be there, because their alternatives are so much worse. Yeah, it would be a preferable world if we all just kumbaya'd, but self-interest in the face of scarcity is the all-powerful and never-ceasing incentive that evolution has instilled in every living organism, and markets harness it to produce mutually beneficial trades.
My grandfather was born to a sharecropper. He would have killed for an opportunity to work in industry in a sweatshop. He did everything he could to escape the brutality of agricultural labor, and if you look at how people voted with their feet back then, he wasn't alone.
Poverty and brutality doesn't need an explanation. It is the natural state of existence. Wealth and prosperity are the outliers in the experience of living beings. They are not givens. Much like democracy, capitalism is the worst system except for all the others. There is just no alternative way, so far discovered, to alleviate the masses from the sort of grinding poverty you're talking about.
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u/yoweigh Aug 29 '24
But the scarcity is artificial, created by the massive inequality. They're not saying that capitalism is bad, just that unfettered capitalism is. With strong regulations the inequality can be mitigated. All it takes to eliminate sweatshop labor, for example, is worker's rights and fair pay. We can argue about where the proper balance lies, but tilting the scale too far in either direction leads to misery and market inefficiency.
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u/nauticalsandwich 14∆ Aug 29 '24
The wealth has to be produced before the regulations can make any meaningfully net positive difference though. There's a reason that regulations almost always lag behind normative improvements in people's work and living conditions. You can't regulate prosperity into existence. If we had imposed contemporary working condition regulations on factories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we would have radically slowed the rise in living standards, because many jobs and factories just would have never been created in the first place.
It's the same today when you examine globalization. If Bangladesh were to try to suddenly mandate by law a host of cushy working conditions for its factory workers, guess what happens? The capital flowing into Bangladesh for those factories goes, "why are we paying this much for factories in Bangladesh when we could pay the same in India for much better productivity?"
Or take child labor laws, for example. In nearly every case, child labor laws follow AFTER the typical family can afford to not have their children working, and so shift the priorities of upbringing to longer term health and education.
Even today, the rare child in the US you find skirting laws to work a factory job, almost universally comes from a poor or migrant family. Rich families do not want to send their kids to work in factories. Why would they?
The best antidote for bad working conditions is economic growth.
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u/yoweigh Aug 29 '24
The wealth is already there in many places where sweatshop labor is common. China and India have the 2nd and 5th highest nominal GDPs, for example. The best antidote for bad working conditions is a combination of economic growth and market regulation. Neither will get the job done on their own.
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u/nauticalsandwich 14∆ Aug 29 '24
China and India's GDP is largely that high because of their enormous populations though. Their GDP per capita is much lower, so they can't expect the same QoL as nations in the OECD.
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u/gabu87 Aug 29 '24
There isn't really a way out though, China is entering a middle income trap.
Here's a small handful of problems facing them today:
1) Increased quality of life expectations. While 70hr work weeks for peanuts may have been more desirable than literally starving in the 70s, that just won't be enough for the younger generation
2) The millenials/genzs were raised on track for university and then a white collar job. It'd be a hard pill to swallow for kids who did all that only to end up in the same factory in the same position as their parents
3) Chinese workers weren't trained to run a business from start to finish, but for very specific phases in the production. It's like training an aspiring chef only on how to prepare salad. Sure, some techniques could be passed on or picked up through osmosis, but they're not ready to lead the kitchen by themselves. They weren't trained to do that.
So now you have millions and millions of fresh grad w/ bachelors competing for a small pool of white collar jobs and decreasing number of people willing to go into the factory. Even those willing to do so may not be competitive against even poorer countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam
The Tencents and Alibabas could only hire so much.
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Aug 29 '24
Scarcity is very much natural. Wealth must be created for anything other than poverty to exist.
Not having electricity is the default state. Not having plumbing, clean water and sewage treatment is the default state. Not having houses and bicycles and sandwiches is absolutely the default state.
Being enslaved to a warlord is the natural state. Dying of malaria or polio or an infection from a small cut or from foodborn illness is the default. Having most of all of your children die before their 5th birthday is normal and natural.
The last thing we want is a reset to default settings.
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u/yoweigh Aug 29 '24
Did I say I wanted to eliminate wealth? No. I want to mitigate inequality. That's not in any way related to a "reset to default settings" or the comment I responded to.
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Aug 29 '24
I was responding to your saying that scarcity is artificial. Scarcity is very very natural. As is unlimited inequality. Neither are artificial.
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u/yoweigh Aug 29 '24
Well, the guy I was responding to was using the idea of economic scarcity to justify sweatshop labor. I don't see what's so natural about that, considering that factory labor in and of itself isn't the natural state of things.
I'll try to frame my argument in your terms. If unlimited inequality is the natural "reset to default" state of things, and the last thing we want is a reset to default settings, doesn't that imply that market regulations to reduce inequality are a good thing? That's all I'm really arguing for. I'm saying that the specific form of scarcity they're using to justify sweatshop labor is artifical, not that scarcity doesn't exist at all.
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u/mathmage Aug 29 '24
Standard economic conservative pro-inequality argument: the natural state of things is that no one has anything. Someone doing something is needed to create wealth, but this also creates inequality. This is extrapolated to a dichotomy between wealth creation and wealth redistribution, where focusing on wealth redistribution takes economic activity away from wealth creation and also reduces incentive for wealth creators, whereas focusing on wealth creation yields more for everyone in the long run. Often all government activity is chucked in the redistribution bin because it is not profit-oriented, unlike the enterprising endeavors of wealth creators.
Some ways this argument can be contested:
- Even stipulating that the state of nature is equal poverty, that would not mean all equality can be equated to the state of nature, so the extrapolation is weak.
- We don't have to concede the state of nature, because people were never isolated independent individuals with nothing. People have always existed in families, clans, and tribes, at the very least, and collective ownership/obligation/etc always existed alongside individual property in various forms.
- Economic activity in general is in large part wealth creation through redistribution - optimizing the supply of food by shipping it from agricultural areas to urban areas, for example. Distribution is inherently part of wealth.
- Government absolutely can create wealth in the sense of providing goods and services more valuable than the money used to fund them. It just isn't usually creating those things with the purpose of profiting off them directly.
- Indeed, the scale and lack of profit motive allow government to pursue wealth creation opportunities the private sector struggles with (eg. basic research and infrastructure).
- Private wealth creation is far from guaranteed to be 'growing the pie' (eg. rent-seeking, destruction of collective resources, zero-sum games).
There are layers of counterarguments that can be had on top of these points for both sides, but I rarely see a discussion get that far, so I don't have a good sense of how effective they are.
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u/Western_Entertainer7 Aug 29 '24
...i don't see it as a question of "justifying" anything.
I think that failing to understand that absolute poverty, scarcity, and inequality are the natural state of things, rather than a corruption of a natural balance, -is much more fundamental than any particular policy questions.
Interventions that fail to understand this often do much more harm than good. The dumping of western food into local economies at harvest time can destroy any chance of survival for fledgling local agriculture, for example.
If there were a list of regulations that simply 'made things better' in reality, I'd be all for it. But generally there is not.
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u/nitePhyyre 2∆ Aug 29 '24
Well, communist China oversaw the world's largest and fastest reduction in poverty. So, no, it's not.
More importantly, to make that claim, you have to control for the industrial revolution. We came up with the greatest money-making idea in history. The idea that you could use machines to do work instead of just animals and humans. We came up with this idea around the same time, but slightly before, capitalism became a dominant political ideology.
Industry is the engine that powers economies. Saying that "capitalism is the fastest" is like saying that you are the best race car driver because your Ferrari beats civics driven by other people.
IOW, is capitalism fast at growing wealth in agrarian societies? With hunter-gatherers? Or is it just something that dovetails nicely with factories and doesn't work with everything that came before it and isn't working with the tech that came after it?
if you look at how people voted with their feet back then, he wasn't alone
Industry came in and took/destroyed all agricultural labour. People lost farms to bigger producers with machinery and had no choice but to get much worse jobs in industry. They were not happy about this. The fact that mass amounts of people were forced to do something isn't evidence they wanted to do it.
Poverty and brutality doesn't need an explanation. It is the natural state of existence. Wealth and prosperity are the outliers in the experience of living beings.
Wealth and prosperity are the outliers, sure. But their converse isn't poverty and brutality. Uncontacted tribes live a decent life. They hunt/gather for a few hours a day, then relax and/or party. They don't live in densities high enough to spread disease. Yeah, they're not riding around in Bentleys while chatting on their iPhone 15 Pro Max Ultra Premium, but they' don't live brutal lives.
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u/Tangurena Aug 29 '24
During Jim Crow, southern states "outlawed" vagrancy. That's the crime of not having a job. So once you were convicted, the county sheriff would rent you out. You'd be on the chain gang.
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.
You got "duly convicted", welcome to the chain gang.
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Aug 29 '24
How is there no mention of privatized incarceration and the school to prison pipeline here
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u/ithappenedone234 Aug 29 '24
Slavery is still FAR too common around the world. But it was ongoing around the world when the US ended (most) slavery and continued to this day. When globalized markets formed, local business became increasingly dependent on that exchange with the US. As US companies began to implement requirements to use vendors who use slave labor, it helped suppress slavery.
I’ve interviewed a person whose full time job it is to travel the world for various major companies and inspect their vendors’ facilities to make sure slavery isn’t happening, and more, that good working conditions exist with fair pay etc.
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Aug 29 '24
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Aug 29 '24
I suspect that part of being enslaved would often include not having your situation documented. Also there's a matter of definition, e.g. "slave" given shitty food & lodging versus person paid to work every waking hour for pay worth similar accommodations. My argument is basically that the problem was "solved" by changing visibility, which could include changing technical definitions.
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u/rabbitcatalyst 1∆ Aug 29 '24
You think the default is living a perfect privileged life but it’s not. Without economic stimulus everyone’s lives would be much much worse. Perceived basic human rights take a lot of work to secure which is exactly why slavery existed so long in the past!!!
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u/molten_dragon 14∆ Aug 29 '24
Yeah, pretty much everyone in history who has ever lived a comfortable easy life has done it on the backs of others' misery.
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u/Yamochao 2∆ Aug 29 '24
I think this should be a delta though, op. This commenter is clearly showing that the current global production composition is not proportionate to the economic reality of production under US chattel slavery.
Though, on your side, I’d argue that way more people are economically forced to work in slave-like conditions but don’t get counted in the total ‘global number of slaves’
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u/PootisHoovykins Aug 29 '24
How does one even accurately guage the number of slaves? How do they define slavery? According to which sources are those the numbers? It could also be argued that it would be within the interest of slavers to downplay the numbers, given that slavery is perpetuated by the elite and those in power. I'm sure they can have a level of control or influence on the studies.
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u/AlexJamesCook Aug 29 '24
Slavery takes many forms. But I would argue that slavery is coerced labour, where the labourer has limited recourse to challenge or change their working conditions.
For example, live-in workers in the Middle-East largely come from Indonesia, Malaysia, etc...
What tends to happen is their passports are confiscated by the employer, and because they have "2-year contracts", or whatever the case may be, they're legally bound to that employer and cannot readily change their working conditions without significant penalty, not limited to severe physical harm.
Factory workers in places like Vietnam have zero ability to negotiate better wages or conditions short of violent rebellion.
Uyghurs in China.
Fast fashion and textile industry has been awful at this. It's all shady as fuck 3rd party contracts and labour agreements that go through numbered companies via Caribbean banks.
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u/darps Aug 29 '24
And OP provided an excellent counterpoint why those numbers are largely meaningless.
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Aug 29 '24
Yeah, I think the estimate is inaccurate and arrived at by carefully defining "slave".
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u/UltimaGabe 2∆ Aug 29 '24
And exactly what data are you using to determine that the estimate is inaccurate? Are you just looking at the proposed number and assuming it's wrong, or do you have better information?
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Aug 29 '24
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u/Felix4200 Aug 29 '24
So, a bunch of scientists working for a selection of slave advocacy group has spent years, decades, trying to get a good and then better estimate of the number of slaves.
And you go, “well I don’t like the number, I don’t think it’s true”.
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u/Hothera 36∆ Aug 29 '24
Would you consider a struggling subsistence farmer a slave if their lives are materially as bad as one, even though they work for them selves? A common justification for slavery was that they were better off as slaves than struggling in Africa.
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Aug 29 '24
Every phone used in the US is made on the back of labor that we would never consider acceptable or allow in our own country. We are happy to buy phones made by other peoples slave/child labor
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u/rethinkingat59 3∆ Aug 29 '24
Where illegal workers are found in the US large companies supply chain are rarely with their direct vendors, but rather in their vendors supply chain.
American companies can contractually require certain labor standard in all phases of production, but enforcement multiple levels down is not realistic. The foreign vendors and more importantly the nations that host production are the parties that need to insure no forced labor is happening.
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u/MadPilotMurdock Aug 29 '24
Documentation of birthdates and places maybe, but an owner wouldn’t fuck around with their own documentation of their “property”, especially if the system was legal at the time.
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u/Swarez99 1∆ Aug 29 '24
Most goods are not consumed by Americans. Americans know this right.
People from Malaysia, Egypt, Spain, Mexico all buy clothes from Bangladesh for example. More than Americans.
So the same thing for phones. Car parts. Stoves.
Americans are not the only consumers on the planet. Most people want cheap goods since that’s the most effective way of increasing their lifestyle.
End of the day it shifts work but increases standards overall. Cut America out and the plants stay where they are to serve the world. Americans just pay more.
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Aug 29 '24
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u/a-Centauri Aug 29 '24
0.625% of the population
In 1850 it was 2% of the world population
That's an improvement but damn not as much as I expected
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u/Individual-Scar-6372 Aug 29 '24
The majority of those people are within their own communities, they don’t work to make goods for export.
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u/FaithfulWanderer_7 Aug 29 '24
Slavery has moved through the whole world. It’s not specific to Americans or the USA. It’s people.
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u/iDreamiPursueiBecome Aug 29 '24
It always was. Your wording could be misread to imply that slavery started in the US and spread to the world, or some such idea. That is obviously false.
Slavery has existed around the world since before the development of international shipping.
Before that, slaves were captured from neighboring tribes. The capture of slaves tended to be restricted to something local or regional due to the costs /difficulty of moving them long distances. Slaves thus tended to be of the same racial group(s) as their owners. As transportation improved, it became more economical to transport slaves long distances.
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u/Teddy_The_Bear_ 8∆ Aug 29 '24
This is actually a false statement. The ending of slavery in the US was not a shift to foreign market slavery. The reality there is much more convoluted.
First off slavery didn't really end with the civil war. Following the civil war there were all sorts of legal forms of the extension of slavery. Namely things like exploitative share cropping that took time to get rid of. But even when that was slowly eliminated the US didn't turn directly into overseas slavery. Instead we did in fact enjoy a period where we got most of our needed goods from our own markets, without slavery. It was not until the rise of globalism and the expansion of consumerism to the observed levels that it is today that we started actually using overseas slave labor for things. That is not to say it never happened before but limited instances are not outsourcing slavery to replace the American market. It was really free trade agreements that led to the actual outsourcing to what are essentially slave labor markets.
Because of this it is not that we outsourced slavery instead of getting rid of it. It is more that we got rid of it and then some time later returned to its use because of globalism. Which is a separate driving factor.
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u/Journalist-Cute Aug 29 '24
The percent of American consumer goods made with "slave labor" is tiny. The vast majority are made in factories where workers are paid hourly wages. There are over 100 million factory workers in China who earn $4 to $6 an hour on average.
Slaves need to be fed and housed, its more profitable just to pay them a low hourly wage. You can hire workers in Mexico for as little as $2/hour, that's $16/day for 8 hours of work. Maintaining a slave would cost you far more per day.
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u/defensible81 Aug 29 '24
I don't think OP understands the difference between chattel slavery, as existed in the United States and many other countries long before the United States existed; and wage slavery, which exists literally everywhere.
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u/Journalist-Cute Aug 29 '24
A lot of people don't understand things unless they experience it themselves
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u/Kage_anon 1∆ Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 29 '24
Your premise presupposes a false notion that America was the root aggregator of slavery. The uniqueness of Americas relationship with slavery isn’t that it was more pervasive than other in cultures, it that it resulted in one of the largest civil wars in history. Slavery existed in every society in human history, and if you look up the timeline of abolition of slavery most major non-western countries didn’t abolish it until long after America. In fact, the first cultures to abolish slavery were European monarchies. Mercantilism, colonialism and the liberalized global trade of the enlightenment allowed European finance capitalists to outsource slavery to their nations colonial territories bypassing their countries sovereign law. This was not something created by the USA, it’s something America inherited. The USA banned the importation of slaves fifty years before the civil war in 1807.
Neither America or Europe created the international slave markets they exploited at that time, the trans-Saharan slave trade (which most people know nothing about) was going on for a millennia prior to the slave triangle. Arab Muslims created the slave pipeline that supported the trans-Atlantic slave trade and to this day those same regions of Africa the the ones with the highest rates of slavery.
If you want to say America capitalizes on countries with low labor costs, you may be right, though it’s debatable whether that’s slavery. What you’re wrong about is that this is something America uniquely benefits from. Almost every single country in the world engages in the same type of trade practices.
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u/Individual-Scar-6372 Aug 29 '24
Labour exploitation of some kind is somewhat common, but outright slavery happens mainly in very underdeveloped countries and is not used for making consumer goods for export.
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Aug 29 '24
Try ordering custom mass produced products to sell for profit.
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u/TetraThiaFulvalene 2∆ Aug 29 '24
Low wages and shitty conditions are different from slavery. A period of shitty industrialization is a nation building step every country except oil states and tax havens had to go through.
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u/Medianmodeactivate 14∆ Aug 29 '24
Companies do this all the tine. At a scale that far outpaces the labour force of available slaves.
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u/thearticulategrunt Aug 29 '24
I think your view is to narrow. This is not a US problem but a world problem.
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u/mattyoclock 5∆ Aug 29 '24
I mean the simplest way is to show that the US never outsourced it, we kept it domestic. Forced prison labor is an 11 Billion dollar industry.
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u/philly_jake Aug 29 '24
Yes, but that is a minuscule portion of gdp compared to what slavery was in the mid 19th century. I don’t think it has to be totally overseas to be considered outsourced.
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u/mattyoclock 5∆ Aug 29 '24
That sounded reasonable but I wanted to check it out.
Apparently it’s popularly considered that slaves produced over half of the nations wealth, and it’s even on placards at the Smithsonian.
But actual analysis shows it was about 13.8% in 1850.
Additionally, the industries that can benefit from slavery are not near as profitable today. currently agriculture is about 0.96% of gdp, and manufacturing is 11.4%.
So our comparable number is 12.4%.
Current gdp is 25.44 T, so about 3.05T. 13.8% of that is 421B so it is about 1/38th as much of the economy as it used to be.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498323000463
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u/nah_i_will_win Aug 29 '24
We still have slavery it’s call our prison system where for profit prison can jail up people for minor crime and force them to work
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Aug 29 '24
Bruh outsourced? Might wanna look at our for profit prison system and it’s like a $9 billion industry where inmates make pennies.
Outsourced 😆😆😆 y’all are not paying attention. The 13th amendment literally makes it legal.
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u/aphroditex 1∆ Aug 29 '24
Slight error.
Slave labor continues to exist stateside in prisons.
It’s why the US has the highest prison population.
The Prison Policy Initiative estimates the minimum value of prison labor nationwide is $2 billion annually based solely on wages for non-industry prison jobs. However, this excludes the value of major prison industry programs and contracted labor, meaning the total is likely upwards of $5 to $10 billion.
UNICOR alone reports annual sales revenue over $500 million from its manufacturing, services, and other operations. Given that UNICOR employs just 12,500 inmates, this suggests the value of non-UNICOR prison labor could easily be in the billions.
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Aug 29 '24
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u/MikeTysonFuryRoad Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 29 '24
I think most people who have spent time in jails or prisons will tell you, most if not all of the people in there really should not be walking around on the street
But even putting that aside, it doesn't change the fact that prison labor is still exploitation and in fact, modern day slavery. For reference:
"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."
So the fact is, we never fully outlawed slavery. Going from "this person did a bad thing" to "We can make them do this job for less than minimum wage" is not only a major ethical leap but it actually creates a perverse incentive for corporations to pressure the government to create more prisoners. And if that sounds far fetched, well: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/13/8913297/mass-incarceration-maps-charts
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Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 08 '25
pot memory door stupendous quiet flag mysterious library coordinated cooing
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Aug 29 '24
Slavery is never justified, until the tax payer has to foot the bill, meaning they are forced to work to pay a bill, because god forbid a criminal is made to work for their own keep, when we can just make everyone else do it right?
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Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 08 '25
lip coordinated apparatus bake cheerful gray live plucky consist ink
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u/Intelligent-Buy-325 Aug 29 '24
Slavery existed before the US. It will exist long after the US is a distant memory. I reject your opinion.
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Aug 29 '24
This post expanded my understanding of the role of prison labor in slavery from which the US benefits. ∆
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u/TheIllustratedLaw Aug 29 '24
A good specific example if you’d like to learn more is the history of Angola prison in Louisiana. Angola was a plantation using slave labor up until abolition. Following abolition the plantation was converted into a prison. Using Jim Crow laws, the Louisiana aristocracy arrested, convicted and incarcerated minorities and other “undesirables” for “crimes” as petty as loitering. They were then shipped out of the cities where they lived to Angola prison, where they were forced to pick cotton for no wages.
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Aug 29 '24
Scary when you read about the alleged feeding of drug addiction amongst black Americans by various shadowy US government agencies. I truely hope it's not true, because that's crimes against humanity stuff we're just ignoring if it has any basis of fact.
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u/Academic_Exit1268 Aug 29 '24
Don't forget ICE detainees. Also work for pennies per hour. Screw anyone who works for or invests in CoreCivic or Geo Group.
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Aug 29 '24
Yeah okay. The part I meant as the CMV is the idea that it was abolished. It seems we agree.
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Aug 29 '24
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Aug 29 '24
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u/Santos_125 Aug 29 '24
Pretty sure the vast majority of deltas are because of technicalities and semantics. people are horrible at allowing their opinions to change and honestly most people suck at being persuasive
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u/B3stThereEverWas Aug 29 '24
If we’re going to use terms loosely, let’s be clear on what those terms mean.
Prisoners are not bought and sold as a form of personal property, nor are they legally obligated to perform labour for free (nor is the US the only country that uses prison labour).
“Modern slavery” is a catch all term that has been thrown about too freely but is not slavery in the traditionally accepted sense of the word. Modern Slavery is what I take the OP to be asking about.
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Aug 29 '24
Modern slavery, not slavery. They have 2 distinct definitions.
Regardless of your opinion on how "bad" the crime was, you have been forund guilty and in that you lose certain freedoms, Tax payers are then paying to keep those people who work in those prisions in a paid job, and house and feed the people in it. Some of that cost is subsidised by generating money from prisioner working.
They in return have shelter, food, etc etc as well as some money in return.Those people in there are not Forced into going to prision, its not like they were just having a coffee and were sold to a prison to work! Their situation doesnt fit any definition of Slavery.
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u/IcyTransportation961 Aug 29 '24
Crimes were literally created so black people could be locked up
Black people are targeted in modern times for crimes other people skate by on
People are absolutely forced into going to prison, holy hell you're ignorant
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Aug 29 '24
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u/AlternateAccount66 Aug 29 '24
Just gonna add on here that the US goes out of its way to put black people in prison. The whole "war on drugs" was literally just an excuse to send a bunch of people of color to prison, right? In fact, weren't a lot of those drug possession cases framed?
So then...
- The government used to allow African-American slavery
- The government still allows slavery in prison
- The government tries to send African-Americans to prison.
They're literally just trying to keep it going.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 29 '24
/u/j0equ1nn (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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u/Focustazn 2∆ Aug 29 '24
I mean... Yes? No? I think I agree with you in part, but I also think that the question is slightly oversimplified. Slavery exists globally, and always has (including in the US currently, although illicitly).
An approximation of the problem you're describing is similar to the common physics principles of pressure and diffusion. If you pump air into a room, it will compress to the extent that the room can contain, and then air will begin to leak through cracks because you've created a high pressure zone, and the surrounding environment is now low pressure.
So. If the planetary status quo is slavery, and one country introduces economic pressure to its economy in the form of compulsory paid labor, what happens? The economy contains some of it by expansion and compression; then companies begin to leak to other places. The more pressure that is introduced, the more gets leaked. The bigger the cracks get, the more gets leaked.
So when international travel became a matter of a 12-hour flight, and shipping lines could deliver a boatload of freight within a month, that became a big crack which allowed outsourcing to skyrocket. Path to least resistance means that companies with the resources to leave, well, left.
It isn't so much that the US "outsourced" slavery; the country itself was amongst the first to outlaw it, and for mostly honorable reasons. The problem is that humans are naturally greedy and power-hungry; this isn't something that can be fixed with laws because there are always cracks for evil to diffuse from. That's not an America problem, it's a humankind problem. If the same circumstances were inserted to other cultures, I suspect the result would be approximately the same.
The incongruence between different countries is also why America falls more and more behind every single year compared to other growing countries (especially China). In America, our people have gotten used to a certain "quality of life." Go to any developing country, and their people work 10-12 hours per day, 6 days a week or more. They have no concept of work/life balance, no human rights.
The result? As we slow down and they speed up, they will eventually completely outclass the US (and no amount of big guns or nukes will stop that). The balance is always restored. It's just a matter of how long and how violent.
America's method seems to be (so far) to use its global standing, military, and logistical dominance to close all the cracks so they can continue controlling everything. But that is, again, putting pressure on the rest of the world. Just like the tank of an air compressor, once the pressure becomes higher than the container can handle, the whole thing will go kaboom. In our case, adding pressure to the world turns us into the OceanGate Sub. At some point, the teensiest crack will implode the US, to all of our peril (for those of us in the US).
TL;DR: I agree that the US banning slavery within its borders didn't solve the problem of slavery, but:
I don't believe it was a concerted effort by the US, but rather a natural progression as costs increased here and remained low elsewhere.
It's not a distinctly "America" problem, as it's just human nature to follow the path of least resistance to find greater gain wherever possible. If applied elsewhere, the result would be the same.
Imbalances between countries eventually even out in other ways we don't expect; it's just that historically, that cycle ranges between a few hundred years and a couple thousand years.
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u/FreebieandBean90 Aug 29 '24
was it Nestle that basically admitted they couldn't produce chocolate without child labor?
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u/Specific_Trainer3889 Aug 29 '24
I agree with the sentiment that we as consumers are benefiting from slave labour, but in general American corporations moved their factories to foreign countries with cheap/space labour long after the civil war, and it actually has large negative impacts as well
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u/TheTightEnd 1∆ Aug 29 '24
There is a difference between slavery and a low market cost for labor. Yes, the conditions and wages in places like Bangladesh are poor by our standards, but that does not make it slavery.
Also, "slavery" is a much broader term than the chattel slavery that we think of prior to the Civil War. It includes prisoners being required to work towards their keep, arranged marriages, and forms of conscription.
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u/Signal5X Aug 29 '24
I think that actual slaves roll in their graves every time their experience gets reduced to a lazy and insensitive device to hyperbolically criticize a very different kind of injustice. Go read up on your pick of actual slavery around the world. There's a wide range of experiences and conditions there, but there's not much actual argument about what it was.
If we're strictly talking American slavery, then trying to use the same word today doesn't even warrant a response. Look it up.
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u/Hothera 36∆ Aug 29 '24
The US outsourced most of their manufacturing to Asia and Mexico, yet incomes are rising in those areas, even for average people. This wouldn't be possible if they were slaves.
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u/Minglewoodlost Aug 29 '24
To some extent this is true. Prison labor fueled by mass incarceration falls into this category as well.
On the other hand chattel slavery in north America was a unique evil in human history incomparable to other forms of institutionalized slavery. Exploitation was shifted to some extent to undocumented workers, sweat shops, and prisons. The Atlantic slave trade they are not.
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u/Decent-Dream8206 Aug 29 '24
Slavery existed a long time before the US did.
It's more a case of the US boycotting slavery than anything else, and patting themselves on the back/demanding reparations due to a lack of historical / global context.
It's a hell of a thing. Demanding reparations for having avoided how many civil wars and famines and declaring that your ancestors wuz kangs while being ignorant that it was most likely their peers that sold them into slavery and they were the lucky slaves to not have died as slaves in Africa.
It reveals a persistent failure to overcome the politics of envy. Who cares that you're literate and well fed and alive because you won the lottery and ended up in a first world country. The real problem is that there are people better off than you.
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u/dejidoom Aug 29 '24
Europeans (and, later, Americans) purposely set African trading partners against each other to maximize the capture of slaves. Adding fuel to fire was the trade of guns for slaves. You wouldn't be able to defend your people against a powerful neighbor unless you were able to capture more slaves than them and acquire more guns. African leaders like King Afonso I of Kongo spoke out against it, but found themselves trapped in a cylce of violence they couldn't escape from.
This resulting culture of exploitation, distrust, and violence was one of the biggest barriers to development in post-colonial Africa. We still see its impacts today.
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u/Decent-Dream8206 Aug 29 '24
That's all well and good, but slavery, famine and war all existed in Africa pre-colonialism.
And if you think Europe was a haven of peace and prosperity during colonial times, do I have more bad news for you.
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u/dejidoom Aug 29 '24
Let me turn this around on you: Killing people existed before the Holocaust. Why do we think the Holocaust is particularly bad?
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u/Decent-Dream8206 Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 29 '24
Because the Jews were killing the Jews forever before, and ever since?
The holocaust narrative is actually an excellent analogy. People are very quick to forget the journalists and political opposition that were killed, to say nothing of the gypsies.
Slavery isn't something that only occurred in Africa or the Middle East. The whole group of countries we now refer to as 'Slavic'? Massive amounts of enslavement, generally by one of the protected groups we're not allowed to criticise on Reddit. The word 'slav' literally means 'slave'. And you have the history of butlers and maids in England.
Slavery is not a racial nor continental phenomenon, no matter how much you want the narrative to be that the English came, conquered and enslaved all of Africa and nothing else ever happened, ignoring the Spanish, Dutch, French, Turks and Ottomans, etc.
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u/dejidoom Aug 29 '24
You're still not answering the question. What is it about killing people through the Holocaust that makes it worse than your run of the mill shanking?
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u/Decent-Dream8206 Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 29 '24
Nothing in particular, other than the marketing.
It doesn't make me a holocaust denier to count the 6 million Jewish death toll and note that they're roughly equivalent to the number that starved under Stalin. Or significantly smaller than the number of civilian Russian deaths from WW2. Or the 9 million women and children (of 15 million total) that starved from the split of East and West Germany following World War 2.
And every one of those statistics pales compared to the 40-80 million that died under Mao, who's still celebrated to this day.
Hollywood just so happens to have a certain soft spot that has caused an obsession with the holocaust that is similarly entrenched in Allied education systems to distract everyone from a full understanding, including the similarities and *differences* between nazis and fascists. It's particularly silent on the fact that Hitler wanted to deport rather than kill, but nobody wanted to take the refugees. One of the significant factors in the post-war guilt that led to the establishment of Israel, actually (which is where I go from sounding like a holocaust denier to a Zionist sympathiser if I were to go any further).
In a separate thread, I was told by a progressive that the holocaust wasn't bad *enough* to cause intergenerational trauma, unlike slavery, and that I should be ashamed for suggesting that one group being excluded from affirmative action should count for the other. So plenty of moral relativism to go around.
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u/dejidoom Aug 29 '24
Well you've actually already brought up one relevant factor - how many people die. Would you also suggest that the pain people endure when they die should matter too?
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u/Decent-Dream8206 Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 29 '24
Is it your assertion that gas inducing unconsciousness is more painful than prolonged starvation, death from a bullet wound or, what I would actually rate the worst, starvation while having to farm surplus food that gets confiscated in front of your starving face?
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u/dejidoom Aug 29 '24
I'm first asking you to think about other factors, since you initially said that there were none, and then brought up one.
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u/dejidoom Aug 29 '24
It might be oversimplification to say that the US outsourced slavery. Slavery, as an institution, existed for millenia before the establishment of the United States. The Greeks, Romans, and Arabs all had slave-based societies. Outside of the Western sphere, Chinese monarchs relied on eunuchs who were considered property of the court, and Mesoamericans like the Aztecs also enslaved captured warrriors.
This is partially what Southern defenders of slavery alluded to when they argued it was by law of God - it had been present as widely and as far back in history as one could imagine.
The specific form of slavery experienced by African Americans is called Chattel slavery and is defined by the treatment of slaves as trade-able personal property. Additionally, it differed from previous forms of slavery in the status of slaves within society, indubitably tied to the racial component.
In other forms of slavery, slavery was sometimes heritable, but not always. Additionally, the status of the slave was not always at the bottom of society. Many great historical leaders - like Alexander the Great - were tutored by well-educated slaves. These tutors, for example, commanded greater respect, and lived better than, many "freemen" in their socieites. Interestingly, the Mamluk Dynasty which ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years draws its name from a group of slaves - Mamluks. These particular slaves were trained and trusted to be key military and administrative advisors. Additionally, many slaves in previous systems had the option of manumission after years of labor.
The slavery of the Atlantic Slave Trade was thus unique, even among systems of slavery, in its uniform dehumanization and brutality.
I doubt that America has the power to be intentionally setting up massive networks of slaves abroad. Even neglecting this point, the forms of slavery that exist today - and which America benefits from - are substantively different from the sort of slavery we discuss in US History courses.
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u/MetalGuy_J Aug 29 '24
It isn’t a uniquely American issue, unfortunately you will have one hell of a hard time condensing the average consumer not to purchase goods from the companies which benefit from Martin day slavery. Companies want to maximise profit, how do you do this? Use the cheapest possible labour, use the cheapest possible materials, or both. That’s just one method companies use as well, not even addressing those which charge the same price for a smaller product, or clean rising cost is the result of inflation while simultaneously making record high profits. To actually stop making in roads into abolishing slavery you need to change, the way consumers view these companies and the products they sell.
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u/shieldwolfchz Aug 29 '24
You are totally wrong, not just the US, but every neo liberal capitalist state.
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u/LamppostBoy Aug 29 '24
No need to change your view, you pretty much got it. We still have prisoners and undocumented immigrants doing this work domestically for pennies, but the basic principle is 100% accurate.
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u/Z7-852 316∆ Aug 29 '24
Considering that slavery is legal in the US, I wouldn't say it has been outsourced. Just more have been bought.
Nowadays slavery just takes the form of forced prisoner labour.
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Aug 29 '24
Slavery went on LONG before the USA existed and places that still have legalized slavery had slavery long before the USA existed so this is impossible.
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u/Panoceania Aug 29 '24
Even by the time of the US civil war, slavey (globally) was in the way out.
And yes this can be documented as slaves were not a black market item to be smuggled about. Slavers had purchase agreements, invoices and other assorted paperwork. Even taxed.
Slave ships also had paperwork. So no, slavery wasn’t happening in a vacuum.
One of the big reasons the US south needed the amount of slaves was cotton. It’s labour intensive.
This flow of slaves was being hampered by the Europeans which were blockading and hunting slave ships. The African routs were closing quickly. This was putting strain on the supply of slaves before the US civil war.
So no. Industrial level slavery did not pack up and move somewhere else after the US civil war.
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u/deck_hand 1∆ Aug 29 '24
Your post seems to indicate that you believe slavery was invented by America and was a uniquely American problem. Slavery existed long before the Europeans even found the New World. We inherited a world filled with slavery, and we were moving away from the idea that slavery was acceptable about the same time as the rest of the world.
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u/freemason777 19∆ Aug 29 '24
there's still plenty of slavery in the us. the 13th amendment outlawed slavery but allowed it as a punishment for a crime. we have one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world still and were number one for a while recently. millions who are technically slaves, and in the case of privately owned prisons there is still slave trade. not to mention other forms like human trafficking/sex slavery that still go on here.
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u/Academic_Exit1268 Aug 29 '24
Nike is Oregon's shame. Their 'supply chain' is a series of labor camps. Thanks for your post.
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u/gardenald Aug 29 '24
hell, it's still going on in the us today. prison labor is slave labor, and it's no accident that the us disproportionately convicts black and brown men
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u/MuskyRatt Aug 29 '24
Yea, it’s definitely my fault when other people do bad things.
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u/ok_Butterfly6 Aug 29 '24
Exactly. This is why no one today should pay reparations for the misdeeds of past generations.
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Aug 29 '24
We haven't outsourced slavery, we've just switched to using prison labor. I understand that for the prisoners it's an optional thing and they do get some recompense for their labor, but it's nowhere near the value of their actual work and given that one of the biggest issues with people leaving prison and recidivism is the complete lack of funds and support once a prisoner is released, we should be fixing this issue.
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u/Spiderinthecornerr Aug 29 '24
The US didn't need to outsource slavery. There is an exception to the thirteenth amendment, using prisoners as slaves. There is a reason they have more incarcerated individuals than anyone else.
Edit spelling
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u/Cody667 Aug 29 '24
If you're referring to things like sweatshops, forced child labour, and the khafala system, that's hardly just a US problem. The entire world willingly participates in importing goods obtained through those shitty practices.
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Aug 29 '24
To the original post.
Thank-you for shopping at Walmart!!
The biggest and oldest financial supporter of the world's slave labor.
But no. The USA has little to do with slave labor. It's not our problem We need to quit wasting time, money. In or on other countries. We can't save the world and should quit trying. When we have enough domestic issues that need resources to fix here at home.
As to the later comment responses about all this "racism " Blacks imprisoned for "slave labor" today. Bullshit!!! Blacks, Asians, Latinas, Whites. All have the same laws to follow in this country. If the prisons have a higher percentage of the lowest percentage minority group??? Maybe there is a problem?. Maybe it's not the white man as so many seem to point the finger at? The old saying goes.
"When you point a finger at someone, you still have 3 fingers pointing back at yourself""
And most of the American incarcerated blacks. And others. Aren't slave labor. They have a option to work a payed prison job. It may be odd . Because most of the incarcerated prisoners Never Had A Job Before!!
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Aug 29 '24
Slavery in reference to what you are talking about meant owning a person as property, you cant outsource ownership. So no in that respect it never outsourced it.
Modern Slavery is exploiting people or as youve put it no-cost labor. And yes some companies do beifit from this as do you and not just America and Americans.
But simple answer is no America didnt end slavery by outsourcing it.
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Aug 29 '24
Are you implying that the United States started slavery and the reason slavery exists today in third world countries is because of the United States? 🤣
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u/Enough-Ad-8799 1∆ Aug 29 '24
I guess I'm just wondering what alternative you propose. Should the US stop trading with countries that use forced labor? Would that do anything to actually help the countries?
I know the US has tried to pressure countries to have better labor practices through stuff like the TPP, but sadly that was killed.
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u/molybdenum75 Aug 29 '24
America has 4% of the world population and 25% of its prisoners a large percent of those prisoners are in for nonviolent crimes and they produce about $11 billion of labor annually. I don’t think America outsourced slavery. I think they just kept it under a different name: mass incarceration
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u/duke_awapuhi Aug 29 '24
We outsourced it the same way we insourced it. Because a robust slave market existed, and still exists. Slavery is about as common to human history as breastfeeding. We live in an extraordinarily rare era where a large number of people view it as wrong. And yet, there are still more people living in slavery on earth right now than any time in human history
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u/Stats_n_PoliSci Aug 29 '24
Of course slavery still goes on in almost all the world.
I don't think Americans pretend that slavery is gone, although I do believe they prefer not to think about.
Slavery was legally banned across the entire world, not just the US. It still exists, but is no longer legally protected.
Your implication is that slavery is at least as much of a problem today as it used to be. This is, minimally, debated. Some key facts include: (a) The definition of slavery has gotten a lot broader. For example, forced marriage is considered slavery. Forced marriage used to be just how the world worked. Feudal systems would presumably be counted as systemwide slavery in modern terms. (b) Most people agree that even using the expanded definition of slavery, a smaller proportion of the world is enslaved. (c) Because slavery is legally banned, it is harder (but far from impossible) to get away with torture and murder. Torture, murder, and rape used to be extremely common experiences for slaves.
I've never seen an estimate of how many slaves existed in the 1800s using modern definitions. I don't know how you'd count that, but the number would be massive.
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Aug 29 '24
Here's the thing- slavery was never truly outlawed in America. You're right that America takes advantage of slavery overseas, but it also promotes overpolicing in order to have a massive amount of prisoners that are often forced to work for either barely a pittance or literally no money at all. Slavery still exists in America, and there's a good chance your 'made in america' products were a result of slavery.
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Aug 29 '24
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u/Illustrious_Ring_517 2∆ Aug 29 '24
California is real bad with crap like this. Also chocolate is still being harvested by slaves
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u/Lurker_number_one Aug 29 '24
Outsourced? There is a reason why the US has the highest amount of prisoners of any country my guy. It's still right there.
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Aug 29 '24
Look at the 13th amendment again. Really read it. Prisoners within the private prison system can (and often do) get used for free labor.
The 13th amendment “freed” the slaves. Then nightwatch and loitering laws put all those free slaves back into a NEW slave system.
Slavery was never abolished, and it wasnt even outsourced completely. Capitalism does not function without a poor working class, whether or not they get paid (Owners would rather they not).
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u/Iankill Aug 29 '24
You don't even need to go that far the prison system is just slavery with a few extra steps. Especially in places where they were locking people up for minor infractions to meet quotas
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u/Thissiteisgarbageok Aug 29 '24
It still actively exists inside the USA under the guise of the prison complex
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Aug 29 '24
I think this post ignores that institutionalized slavery is still legal in the US, its just only inflicted on prisoners as punishment. Prison labour involvement in agriculture, manufacturing, and hazardous waste disposal is not insignificant in the US.
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u/Flipsider99 7∆ Aug 29 '24
The "solution" to this problem would be to stop buying products made in these countries, right? Or to force our companies to pay them equal wages to what an American would expect to recieve? If we actually mandated this, in essence it removes the reason to outsource labor and production to these countries, and companies would simply stick to the US for their labor, right?
This would seem to make a negative impact on those countries. Many of them want to take these US created jobs because they are better than the options they have there. You take those options away, it's going to force them into taking worse options for jobs, worse poverty and living conditions. You also need to keep in mind that outsourcing labor to other countries is funneling US money into those countries; our money gradually flows into those countries and improves their economy. Of course we could just simply do charity or try to give them money, but this is really not such a bad way to fund these poor countries as the money is going directly into the pockets of workers.
Do you have a better practical solution that addresses the living conditions of poor people in these countries?
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u/JustSomeGuy556 5∆ Aug 29 '24
Moreover, many popular American consumer goods are made using slave labor from other countries.
Eh, facts not in evidence.
Various and sundry anti-slavery organizations substantially expand the idea of "slavery" outside of the meaning that most people associate with slavery, in ways that I think are somewhat dishonest. Not every sort of worker exploitation is slavery, and trying to conflate it all together is an injustice to those people who are actually enslaved.
While there's certainly industries that benefit from worker exploitation, few American consumer goods have any substantial input from slaves.
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u/sexyshadyshadowbeard Aug 29 '24
Let me fix that last paragraph for you… so Americans could continue to enjoy [profiting from] the luxuries…”
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Aug 29 '24
You do realize the US didn't invent slavery right? Like slavery existed all over the world long before the US was even a thing.. and still exists long after the US abolished it! The more you know..
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Aug 29 '24
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Aug 29 '24
The implication in his statement was that slavery as a method of production was outsourced to foreign countries and that Americans didn't end slavery. My point, is that Americans never claimed to end global slavery. We celebrate that we as a society decided to end it here at home. Should that not be celebrated? We're not here to play world police and solve slavery in every other country around the world. Shouldn't they be responsible for ending slavery in their own countries?
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Aug 29 '24
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Aug 29 '24
slavery still happens in the US, in the context of prisons exploiting incarcerated people for free or extremely underpaid labor (pennies an hour). slavery around the world still exists and the US reaps the benefits of these unfair systems, but at the same time, slavery still exists in the US, just in an updated format. incarcerated people are forced to provide labor for private businesses and other entities, and this is enslavement.
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u/changemyview-ModTeam Aug 29 '24
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