To Start slavery in any form is immoral and needs to be abolished from every corner of the globe.
I am asking this because I heard somewhere that a big factor for the banning of slavery in these industrialized areas of the world (I.e Britain and the Northern US) was motivated by profits because it was better on profits to have paid workers rather than slaves.
That could also be 100% wrong but if it is true then wouldn’t slave labor bring more profit than a paid worker?
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Slave labor is unwilling labor. Slaves will always do the bare minimum that will prevent punishment, because there’s no reward for doing more. You don’t need to pay slaves, but you do need to pay a lot of people to keep them from escaping, catch them if they do escape, punish them for not working hard enough, move them around, buy and sell them and so on. This can be almost as expensive as just paying for work.
Also, the most valuable forms of work in an economy can only be done by people who have education, specialized skills, or trustworthiness. You wouldn’t want to teach a slave to become a machinist, for fear they’d start making weapons to revolt against you. Or a doctor, for fear they’d poison you. So slavery makes it hard for your society to engage in the most valuable sectors of the economy, you’re stuck growing crops and banging rocks.
And as the Industrial Revolution grew, a new problem arose. Free workers can learn to build and operate machines, but you can’t trust slaves to do that. That means you lose out on the chance to mechanize and automate your economy, at which point it’s your slave labor against some other society’s machine labor, and now you’re *really* screwed.
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