this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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United States | News & Politics
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America incarcerates people for a ridiculous time and then lets them 'voluntarily work to shorten their sentence'. It's slavery with a little semantics.
As long as it's not forced (truly voluntary with no punishment otherwise) it's still not enslaving them.
I'm not saying it's good, but the title has an agenda.
Edit: Actually, the POSTER has the agenda, not the article. OP used the world enslaves. The actual article title is ‘Essential’: nearly 800 incarcerated firefighters deployed as LA battles wildfires. This is why a lot of places have no editorializing the titles rules.
What do you think about indentured servitude being called slavery?
I agree that's slavery.
There is slavery in the US prison system as well.
These prisoners are supposedly doing this specific job voluntarily, with pay. That is not indentured servitude.
Voluntarily risking their life for 5 to 10 bucks a day. Suuure.
If you'd like to provide any proof that these fire fighters are not doing this voluntarily and are coerced into it with some sort of punishment if not, please go ahead and provide it. Specifically this job, not others.
Also, you do realize that many fire fighters across the world are voluntary, in some cases the entire fire department is voluntary. People do risk their lives for this job for free.
And slaves voluntarily worked on the cotton fields. Great trolling.
Being voluntary doesn't contradict slavery. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_slavery
Being paid $0.50 an hour, as opposed to $0.00 an hour, is trivial. If the slave-owners of old societies gave their slaves a penny a day, they would still be slaves for all intents and purposes.
While I personally haven't looked into this specific case, there is a very consistent and ongoing history of forced prison labor in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#Prison_labor
That is forced work on an imprisoned person upon threat of punishment, even if they can theoretically decline it. This is a form of slavery, even if they get paid a dollar an hour.
There is a history of this yes, but there is no signs that this is happening with this specific situation. I even said, if this case had that, it would be slavery.
The website for the program, while can't be fully trusted, explicitly states that this is not the case
Edit: And just to be clear - Yes, they might be forced to do something else if not this, but that's probably up to the prison specifically. That alternative would be slavery, but these people are freely volunteering. They were not enslaved into this as OPs editorialized title implies.
Thanks for bringing up that program site (link, for convenience)
Like you said, it's hard to know the internal situation in the prison, so it's reasonable to want to avoid labeling this specific case as slavery or not without further evidence. The title is ultimately subjective, rather than the objective titles a news community typically encourages (by 'subjective', I'm referring to the fact that different worldviews have different interpretations of slavery, even up to the point where many through history consider regular work to be wage slavery based on a holistic analysis of labor in society)
Just had some time to look at that wage slavery wiki, I had heard the term, but didn't know it went so far back with that much history around it.
I imagine the only way out of this would be a non poverty level UBI?
Yeah, same when I came across it. I'd assumed it was just some recent hyperbole, but it's a long-used term with serious theoretical backing.
UBI is one of the suggestions, one in the reformist category. However, looking at the little progress made by most countries in reforming capitalism over many decades, and in light of the control that the owning class have over politics and economics, many instead propose revolutionary solutions. Obviously, the richest of the rich would prefer to avoid either, and use the mass media to promote UBI as a bandage for capitalism, while using their influence over politicians to avoid even that happening. Unless citizens can gain real power, the promise of UBI is a long road to nowhere. If we ever see it, it will probably only be used as a last compromise to avoid revolution.
The alternative to reformism, the revolutionary solutions, demand a major reorganization of society to control or replace the capitalist wage system. Now, that's the simply summary, but the details stretch across about a century of theoretical and practical discussion and experience, from a broad range of worldviews and circumstances, from partyless direct-democracy anarchist communes to one-party states and everything in-between. I couldn't hope to do it justice here.