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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Slaves need to be maintained. With the paid labour model, a (barely, if at all sufficient) wage is distributed to the workers to finance their own lives. It shifted the power in a different way, where now the workers “desire” being exploited.
Slave labor is normally under-reported. I don’t have any, but if I did, I would not tell anyone. So any estimates of the number of slaves making products would be hard to gauge accurately. Capitalistic labor is easy to track. easier.
A skilled laborer can improve their craft, by working with other customers and negotiating their pay. Being able to negotiate with you employer will improve productivity, encourage better skill set and save money in the future.
It doesn’t.
That’s why we have the prison industrial complex. That’s why our clothes are made with slave labor. Our Chocolate and coffee are harvested with slave labor. The immigrant field workers all over America are barely distinguishable from enslaved people
What you heard is feel good propaganda. A lot of people fought against slavery just because free workers can never.compete in a market with enslaved workers.
People could not get jobs, because enslaved people were doing those jobs for free/cheaper. This was a major topic of arguments and fights in Congress before the civil war in America.
You can learn more by searching “free soil free labor” movement.
Slave labor is in fact the cheapest form of labor since the “employer” has total control over the cost of labor. If slaves are plentiful they can work them to death and get new ones (like Nazi Germany in WWII).
The US found other ways of exploiting labor, through Chinese coolies, prison labor, company towns and so on, but those forms were still more expensive than chattel slavery. Plus slaves in the US were used as collateral in financial transactions, a kind of profit making you can’t do with people who aren’t your property.
economy is all about doing things efficiently
so which is more efficient?
people doing things of their choosing for the reward
people doing things against their will for no reward
paid worker costs more , but it also makes more, much, much more.
Slaves you must house, feed, care for regardless of how badly you do it. If slaves die they aren’t free to replace.
A “free” man constrained by nothing but Capitalism will toil for money, then spend that money housing, feeding and caring for themselves.
Catch it on the way back.
Slaves don’t tend to do more than is absolutely necessary to avoid punishment. The moment the overseers back is turned, they will try to avoid doing anything. After all there’s usually no possible reward for doing a good job, just a punishment for doing an unacceptably bad job. Thus it’s in the slave’s interest to be as bad as possible at their job. To “accidentally” break equipment. To cut every possible corner.
Meanwhile paid laborers can be fired. They can be promoted. They have reasons to do a decent job. If the factory breaks down, they don’t work and thus don’t get paid. So no incentive towards sabatoge. So yeah, paid laborers have a lot more incentive.
It is wrong, and most of these comments are grasping at straws. Slavery was abolished primarily for moral reasons. Slave owners benefit enormously from slave labor, no one else does directly. Sure the Northern US got cheaper cotton and Britons enjoyed cheaper tobacco, but in a democratic society someone running on ‘hey, let’s ban slavery’ is an east way to seem like a good person among the other sleazy politicians.
Was this question inspired from the movie emancipation?
In that particular case, it’s quite possible that freeing the slaves was more beneficial for the economy in the more developed states. If so, it was likely not done out of goodwill, but rather the benefits it could bring.
So how would freeing the slaves be beneficial financially? Well slaves were only useful for really basic work, like picking cotton and manual labor. Most were illiterate and uneducated, greatly limiting what kind of work they could do. Today we have people who do jobs like drive trucks, and use heavy machinery on job sites. One of these workers can replace many many slaves. It’s much better to have one truck driver than 5 slaves that can’t read or write, or do much of anything.
Today we are definitely moving back towards wage slavery. The capitalists can have their cake and eat it too, as they pay us almost nothing to do highly skilled work.
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