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 only really works for low skill work that requires a lot of hands, like agricultural work such as picking crops or making cheap clothing or mining gems. Things that require a higher degree of skill or that involve expensive machinery are better served by paying wages, because then people are motivated to develop those skills, and demotivated from destroying company property. If a slave tried to damage a crop they probably wouldn’t cause too much damage before they were stopped unless they involved a large group of other slaves, but a single employee could cause severe and permanent damage to an expensive piece of factory machinery in seconds if they were so motivated.
Ive read the same thing, that slavery was on its way out because it was inefficient.
Consider all the additional costs involved with slavery, some measure of control and enforcement to avoid anyone running away, you still have to provide food, clothes, shelter. Plus the expense of purchasing slaves to begin with.
And at the end of the day, you had an incredibly unmotivated workforce who had no interest in working hard beyond avoiding some sort of punishment.
It didnt really save anything over a paid worker who recieved wages barely enough to afford food, clothing, and shelter, but he would be motivated to work harder in such a way that he might be rewarded with some portion of the marginal productivity he could provide. The other portion of course, being in the land owners pocket.
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.
150 years ago the economy was very different. The vast majority of manual workers were poor, with barely enough to live on, eg, in the UK, several families shared one small house. You could hire a worker for a few weeks.
A large cost was food, and workers needed a lot calories.
Slave owners needed to buy the slave (large cost) AND provide food and shelter. And if the work is seasonal, you still have to provide food.
Plus, slaves would either be born in the US and have minimal education, or come from Africa, where their skills would have little use.
Slave owners knew that slaves from Africa would take several years to become ‘acclimatised’, meaning able to provide meaningful with without disruption.
Finally, free men would work harder to ensure the got another day’s work or build up their money.
This question really struck me because I did not know and none of the comments seemed that convincing to me. If slavery is less profitable why would planters keep it? Were they just so racist they’d rather take less profits? But if it were more profitable, why did industrial areas abolish it? Were industrial capitalists the type to uniformly choose morality over profit? So I did a bunch of my own googling and have come to the conclusion that there is no concrete answer.
The remainder of this is written mainly for myself based on an hour of googling.
The assumption I came to this with was that slavery must be profitable for plantation work, but unprofitable for industrial work. But I couldn’t figure out why.
Slavery is mostly profitable for labor intensive endeavors. Growing wheat is only seasonally intensive, it doesn’t make economic sense to purchase a slave that only works during harvest. However, crops like sugar, tobacco, and cotton are year round labor intensive. There is also economy of scale, so it is more profitable for a massive plantation to buy one slave than for a small farm.
But a cotton mill isn’t seasonal work, and one could easily employ as many workers as a large plantation, so why didn’t they use slaves? There are some advantages, a slave has an upfront cost that a wage worker doesn’t, and setting up a mill (or other industrial endeavor) already has a high upfront cost, so an industrialist might prefer to minimize their debt and go for a wage worker. And a slave-owner has to pay for the subsistence of their slaves already, but a wage could also be at subsistence level.
But this would imply that slave owners were just dumb for not hiring wage workers. So my conclusion is that wages were disgustingly low but rarely true subsistence; **that slaves were in fact more profitable**. Even in industrial operations. I read about slaves being used in profitable salt mines. A cotton mill staffed by slaves would be more profitable than one with wage workers.
However, slavery does not create conditions that are useful for industrialization. Under slavery, when looking to improve profit, you can simply push your slaves to work even more. Investing in new technology might massively increase profitability (like the cotton gin) but it is one tool among many. For someone employing wage labor, asking workers to work longer increases cost. So labor reducing technologies are far more valuable when labor is an ongoing cost.
Also, a slave to does not create economic demand. Many slaves grew their own food and made most of their belongings, and thus created no economic demand. But wage workers bought everything they needed, and any money they earned above subsistence also created more economic demand. This demand boosted the profits of industrialists, allowing further expansion.
**tl;dr: slavery is more profitable but creates an economic situation unfavorable to industrialization (not a definitive answer/based on an hour of googling)**
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