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It is a recognized idiom in many English dialects:
> If people work very hard for long hours for very little money, you can refer to it as slave labor.
* https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/slave-l...
> very hard work for which people are paid very little
* https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/slave-la...
> (informal) work that is very hard and very badly paid
* https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/americ...
See also "working in the salt mines" where people do not literally take sodium chloride out of the ground.
* https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/back+to+the+salt+mines
Your understanding of the word is not standard.
If you stop short of saying McDonalds workers are slaves, and that they are merely closer to being slaves, then you are agreeing with me.
Slavery is not being poorly compensated or coerced into work.
It kind of is though :/
Like I get what you're saying, minimum wage workers have an autonomy that slaves would not have. But in practice that autonomy is often not meaningful in any real way.
I don't know. I just think that "You're a hair above being a slave so it doesn't count as slavery" is probably not a hill worth dying on
You could say minimum wage at $7.25 but very few people actually make that (1%).
Or maybe an entry level aid in an eldery home making $11/hr and cleaning the anus and genitals of old men that are hitting on them. Would you agree $11/hr is poor remuneration for that kind of job? Or would you argue there is no one poorly remunerated?
We call that "wage slavery" for a reason
It’s absolutely less than slavery.
Slaves are property. They have no rights. They can’t quit. They can’t claim unemployment or long-term disability. They can be summarily executed.
You can kind of fuck around idiomatically with the term slavery in some cultures. But not in ones that had chattel slavery.
It’s not and it’s absolutely ahistoric to make this claim. (Not disputing that it’s a popular view in some circles.)
> Work for a wage (AKA sell their time and/or bodies), or die
They can change employers. Slaves can’t do that in any system. If you want a proper comparison it’s to serfdom.
So, there has only ever been one type of slavery, and all slaves had the exact same set of restrictions? Yeah, nah, not with you on that.
And just because a wage slave can switch from McDonalds to Taco Bell, does not make them any less slaves.
You seem very tied to a very specific conception of slavery that only matches African-American slaves in the US. There is far more to it; it's about freedom. And if you think being poor your whole life, being allowed to switch fast food joints, never getting ahead and never having a chance to get ahead, never having any land because it's all already owned, that all that is freedom, well, you clearly have a different conception of freedom than I do, and I would never want to be subjected to yours.
Capitalism is really good at convincing people that this is the only way things can be, and freedom is the ability to sell your body and time. I reject that completely.
No. Nobody claimed this.
> seem very tied to a very specific conception of slavery that only matches African-American slaves in the US
I'm anchoring to that for discussions happening regarding conduct in America, yes. If minimum-wage jobs are literally slavery, then slavery–to a lot of Americans–isn't that bad, and slavery for Americans will by default mean slavery within the America context, i.e. chattel slavery.
That said, slavery has real definitions and tests, and words like subject and serf exist because people have been debating and defining these terms for millennia, regardless of Reddit or NewsMax's redefinition of these terms.
> that all that is freedom
Nobody argued this either.
> Capitalism is really good at convincing people that this is the only way things can be
Another straw man. We can raise the minimum wage and establish social guarantees without trivializing slavery.