this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
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And how is that in any way form or shape a good thing?
Prison forced labor is just Indentured Servitude with extra steps to give it the appearance of legitimacy and fairness.
It seems to me (not at American) that the intention to exploit people who have no other choice was there from the start. Create a structure were you can get cheap/free labor of people who have been deemed by others to be LABEL (in this case, a felon) and deprived of their freedom and you always end up with more and more people being given LABEL and deprived of their freedom so that the can be used as cheap/free labor.
The United States has long been the nation in the World with the highest percentage of people in prison, so one either believes that human beings in the US are different and more prone to crime or that there is a higher incentive in the US than elsewhere at the level of who controls those things to put people in prison and getting cheap or even free work sure sounds a lot like such an incentive.
The well was poisoned from the very start.
As I see it, this is far from the only way in which America is Exceptional but not in a good way and if one thinks further out from that, one can conclude that movements such as MAGA, the way workers are treated and a lot of other phenomenons in the US rooted in not treating ones' fellow human being as a person are in fact all part of one broad systemic cultural and political problem.
I'm not saying that it is, I've even called it an abomination on many occasions, I'm just saying that the use of it in the past was limited to people who wouldn't get much sympathy from society at large, rightly or wrongly.
And I am further saying that one of MAGA's primary characteristics is finding loopholes in otherwise benign laws and policies, and they have identified 13A as one that ripe for serious exploitation. They simply can't resist abusing every opportunity that comes their way. Slavery comes with the added advantage of being very lucrative, and Trump REALLY can't resist that.
IMHO, the almost idolatry of the Constitution in the US meant that a what's essentially a Prototype of Modern Democracy kept getting used without a systemic update for too long and was essentially relying on everybody being a gentleman to work.
Personally the whole part were the Political Pillar being in charge of nominating the top of the Judicial Pillar - the Supreme Court Judges - even though in Democracy those Pillars are supposed to be independent, always felt like a major weakness in the face of Authoritarian encroaching, as did the First Past The Post voting system.
That's the point I'm trying to make: the flaws in the American system are systemic, making it more easy from autoritarians (not just Trump's Fascists but also the Oligarchy that stands behind both the Republicans and the Democrats) to control it.
The main difference with the Fascists is how brazen then are in doing so, which the other bunch would be far more discrete (hence which the Prison population in the US was already so large under the "other" political party of the US Duopoly system).