If Owning Slaves Was Legal Today...

Imagine an alternate timeline or parallel reality in which almost everything stays the same, but slavery was never abolished. Let me take you on a thought-experiment and show that markets would have replaced slaves with a much cheaper workforce anyway...

_{source: Wikimedia Commons Family of slaves in Georgia, circa 1850}

So, for the sake of this thought-experiment we will assume the American Civil War never took place and owning slaves would still be legal today. What would it cost to maintain a slave? First there's the cost of transport and efforts to be made to take the slave and involuntarily transport him or her to the workplace. These costs are lost if the slave flees of course.

Then you have to buy clothes and food. He or she needs a roof over the head, a place to rest and if sick, medicine; this is all essential to keep the slave's productivity as high as possible. All things considered, it's not too hard to imagine that keeping a slave will cost a lot, maybe even more than what's payed today as minimum wages.

If you are particularly cold and calculating, you could say that the need for maintaining a slave depends on what it costs to buy a new one; if buying a new slave is cheaper than clothing, housing and feeding one, you should let them die and keep replacing them to maximize profits. Although this could be true, in reality slaves were often treated like part of the small community and many interracial kids have been born that way to.

_{source: Rob le Pair "Philipstown" in Eindhoven 1923}

When slavery was abolished, and the industrial revolutions took place, many owners of large factories built low-rent houses especially for their workers, because they felt a sense of responsibility for the well-being of their employees, same as the slaveholders. Here in the Netherlands there's still a lot of those houses in the city of Eindhoven, hometown of Philips.

But that also is not the case anymore. Our biggest employers now lobby our governments for lower minimum wages, less worker-protection laws, less environmental protection laws and ever more freedom for international trade, which is the main reason the EU exists. Don't forget it started as and still is a union between industries, not people or nations; originally it was called the "European Coal and Steel Community", with coal and steel being the biggest industries of the time.

_{source: Wikipedia Slavery in contemporary Africa}

And now, where they have the opportunity, our employers have gone full circle. No longer do they have to transport their workers to the farm or factory: they will take the factory or farm to them. This is all to the benefit of the "slave" as well, as he doesn't have to relocate to a country where he'll be plagued by racism and homesickness. No longer do the employers have to pay the minimum wages we have fought over for decades. No longer do they have to adhere to the environmental protection laws we have struggled for. Nor do they have to pay taxes in the countries they started their fortunes in, thereby no longer supporting the people that worked to make them grow in the first place.

It's save to say, I think, that no wars were necessary to get rid of slavery; the holy markets would have invented the criminal wage-slavery we know today anyway; it's much cheaper to just pay some minimum wage and say "now get out and come back tomorrow", than it is to actually take some responsibility for your employees well-being. Even if owning slaves was legal today,that couldn't measure up to the bargain big multinationals have arranged for themselves by globalizing industry and money, instead of globalizing people.

Now, please do not think I'm trying to romanticize slavery in the old days: of course that was bad and inhuman, as I have heard from my own ancestors. Also I don't want to diminish the importance of the American Civil War. I just want us all to not forget that the wage-slave of today is the cheaper replacement for the slave from yesteryear. Also, when slavery was abolished, most slave-holders were compensated for their supposed loss of income.

_{source: Creative Commons Images Outsourcing or reverse-slavery?}

What I'm trying to say is this: I work for one of these multinationals myself, and most of my co-workers seem to be grateful that their boss is employing them. I "strangely" am not grateful. I know that our boss would be crazy if he payed us a fair wage: what my work produces is worth exponentially more than what I get payed. I also know that this is even not enough for the board of shareholders as a lot of jobs have already been moved to low-wage countries; if I need technical assistance I call from The Netherlands to India and speak English. Even surgeons now email their x-ray photo's to low-wage countries to have then analyzed there and the results mailed back to them...

And if things don't change, my job will also be relocated in the not so distant future, all according to the reverse-slavery I described above. Wrap your mind around that and leave a comment on how that makes you feel.

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