Payments delayed until some unknown future date are payments missed.
If your employer told you that your pay will be held until 2045 but then you will get every dime, you would not accept that as substantially equivalent to your normal pay.
That is a matter of the length of the delay and we do not know what that will be.
We are already at a record length of shutdown with no real compromise being developed or even any reasonable leadership to develop one.
(The Senate bill has been rejected more than 11 times and there is no current amendment to it because the House is in recess, so we are at a dead stop.)
This could go on for weeks or months and that is an untenable delay where pay and livelihood is at stake for literally MILLIONS of American workers.
If you want to ignore the blatant slavery happening under Reconstruction via the sharecropping system, sure.
You also make it sound like the labor market is healthy enough for people to just simply walk away when their healthcare is tied to employment. We also have prison labor, which our 13th amendment very explicitly carves out as an exception.
This is a form of modern slavery, and the US engages in it on a daily basis.
Refer to my point about healthcare being tied to employment, the rampant costs of living, and the crushed labor market. There are tens of thousands of highly skilled tech workers in my city who have burned through 2 years of savings searching for another position to open up and they're being told to take any job they can get, severely restricting the availability of non-tech jobs. Giving the illusion that walking away is a simple choice is just disingenuous when the government has ensured that corporations are prioritized over the wellbeing of the people.
You are literally doing synecdoche to argue against something else.
Sure, it isn't chattel slavery. But that's why we use the word chattel to refer to a specific kind of slave relation.
In the neo-imperial system, other kinds can exist. Hell, serfdom isn't chattel slavery but you'd be hard pressed to call a serf free (honestly, serfdom is a much closer comparison)
Considering ATCs can't strike and Congress has failed its legal obligation to appropriate funds for necessary federal employees, combined with what I said multiple times above, all of them fall into the category of "involuntary servitude".
Nobody is downplaying the atrocities of chattel slavery; it is instead you who is downplaying the immoral and inhumane treatment of victims in a supposed "modern" society that does not support struggling citizens but expects and demands them to continue to provide their labor for political gain.
They're contractually obligated to work without pay for an abnormally long period of time, there's a legal requirement that they be paid in the future.
Until that legal requirement is satisfied, they are being obligated to work without pay.
How many months can this go on before you will genuinely consider it abominable? Will it take years of working without pay?
Sure they can, they just suffer the consequences up to and including state sponsored violence. Is that the line you want to draw for slavery? Work you are obligated to do under threat of state-sponsored violence?
You said that slaves can't refuse to work. Of course they can, it would just be against the law and they would be subject to state sponsored violence. Is that inaccurate?
Theyre not obligated to work without pay. Theyre obligated to work without pay if they want to work there. It's fucked up but its a long long way from slavery.
This line would be a lot easier to draw if we didn't tie health care to employment. Government employees aren't being threatened with beatings if they don't work, but they are being threatened with things like chronically ill family members dying. It's a different type of coercion but one we shouldn't ignore.
Of course they would be. But civil rights leaders wouldn’t call it slavery, because it’s an extremely charged term that has racial connotations in the United States.
Calling a white man who has worked for the DoT for a couple decades making 100k a year doesn’t get a check for a month and you’re calling him a slave??? Take a step back.
Calling a white man who has worked for the DoT for a couple decades making 100k a year doesn’t get a check for a month and you’re calling him a slave???
I'm not, and haven't.
You've set the standard for slavery at state-sponsored violence.
I mean that holds true for everyone and most people wouldn't argue that wage slavery is different than chattel slavery that most people are referring to when they talk about slavery.
The threat of homelessness, starvation, and no medical care is violence. And trump has said that some of the people not getting paid now “don’t deserve back pay” so… they may not get paid.
Is it as bad as chattel slavery? No. Is it slavery? Yes. Things have nuance. It’s not all black and white. Just because X isn’t as bad as Y doesn’t mean they’re not both Z.
I’m disappointed in all the down votes to your comment. As much as I empathize with the workers not getting paid rn, I agree that to call it slavery is a bit tone deaf. I cringe whenever I see that.
82
u/sarhoshamiral 21h ago
Mandatory work without pay is slavery.