Should voluntary slavery be legalised?

Voluntary slavery already exists. It’s called volunteering and work experience. People choosing to work for nothing.

Doesn’t it already excist with people working for a wage they couldn’t possibly live off of????

I think they call this tradition “internship”.

Apparently few know the actual definition of slavery. Slavery is not a part time job, without pay. It is ownership. Slaves, even those who sign into it willingly, surrender their choices. They live where they must. They sleep only when dismissed to do so. Marriage is not an option.

I wrote an opinion regarding some of the previous answers, and forgot to offer my own answer. No. It is far to easy to exert pressure, influence, confusion and cause someone to be forced into a slavery scenario. If it were legal, oh man, would that be a can of worms out of control.

Hm, Forcing someone to work for no income or else your $100,000 student debt will go forever unpaid because they won’t be able to secure a job in their industry without the (unpaid) experience is nothing at all like someone legally exerting pressure, influence, and confusion to gain the benefit of their labor.

I don’t think there’s demand for this, so no, it shouldn’t be legalised.

No. I had enough loss of freedom from School.

No. International law prevents people from selling their basic rights away for good reason. They are so valuable that no one would agree to sign them away unless they were mentally unwell or under so much duress that their autonomy was being violated. Both conditions make contracts involuntary by law, so really there is no such thing as voluntary slavery no matter what euphemism some people might use.

@Seek Right. That’s why it’s called wage slavery. But I think @Here2_4 was responding to the earlier, completely unhelpful answers.

Unpaid internships have no wage, so by definition cannot be wage slavery.

Depends on whose definition you are using. Engels’ analysis would include internship as an extension of the same system.

If it is voluntary, it isn’t slavery. It may have another name, but it you if you are of sound mind and volunteer, it isn’t slavery

@josie , and @otherswhodontgetit, It is/was a real thing, legal, with a contract. Read about it here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant
and here http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured-servants-in-the-us/
It was called indentured, but make no mistake, it was human ownership. It was slavery.

Voluntary slavery is an oxymoron.

Indentured servitude was a voluntary way to to earn the opportunity to make a journey that some people otherwise could not afford. It had a time or value limit. When the contract was fulfilled, non slave, voluntary worker walked away. Maybe they went to public schools after that.

In San Francisco, I had a friend who was a professional dominitrix. She had people who paid tons of money per hour to be her slave. She’d have these high power executives scrubbing her kitchen floor naked with a toothbrush, just to hear her bitch and complain that it wasn’t good enough and they needed to start over.

I never wanted to be a dominitrix, but I was kind of jealous that not only did she have a crew of servants doing all her housework, they paid her to let them do it.

@josie @skfinkel “Voluntary slavery” is the technical term that political philosophers use to refer to the institution of signing a contract after which one becomes a slave. It is not really an oxymoron when you consider the fact that slavery is defined by not having any legal rights (and often being considered property under the law rather than a person) rather than the way in which one becomes enslaved (which is why other forms of bonded labor generally aren’t counted as slavery even if they are entered into involuntarily). Some right-libertarian philosophers have argued that it should be legal to contractually sign over all of our rights—that is, to sell ourselves into slavery. But most philosophers (including most right-libertarians) think that this is illegitimate. The most common claim is that the right to property in oneself (this being the only basic right that some right-libertarians recognize and see all other rights being dependent on) is inalienable and thus not able to be lost (voluntarily or otherwise).

I read this article a few weeks ago and it gave me the chills.

For those who don’t read links, I’ll give a quick recap of it. Apparently, there are legal and documented immigrants who come to work in the US on a visa. When they get here, their Visas and passports are taken away, and treated like slaves. They are forced to work 16 hour shifts with no days off. They aren’t allowed to leave the property. They are forced to pay for their Visa and their living expenses (at a high price. One guy was charging his workers 1000 a month to sleep in a trailer with 10–15 other guys. ) They are required to perform sexual acts. If they don’t obey, their bosses threaten to call the police and report them as undocumented.

It’s illegal, but the local police officers are easily bribed. They frequently help out the employers by showing up in uniform and scaring the workers. Also, many employers say that if they get caught, they only have to pay a nominal fine. They don’t even lose their right to request these Visas from the he government and get more workers. So getting caught is no big deal, because they still earn huge profits even when they get the stiffest punishments the law currently allows.

I know it’s technically illegal, but when local, State and national government does almost nothing to stop it, it might as well be. I think the laws are lax about these workers because these employers give very large donations to their government officials to keep the laws light on it. Since many Americans seem to hate immigrants these days, nobody really cares enough to protest.

It’s sad, and it’s probably the closest thing to slavery we have. The only thing I can think of that’s worse are those southeast Asian and Indian rackets where they trick farm girls into being child prostitutes.

The time limit is often extended for various reasons. Many times, the debt has carried over to the next generation. It is no easy peasy little thing.

No, it’s a massive human rights violation. Slavery still happens today in a lot of places. Not legalizing it is literally the least we can do.

According to international law, and U. S. constitutional law, Freedom is an inalienable (syn: un-alienable) right. An inalienable right is a right person cannot (vs. may not) be alienated from, which means that this right cannot be transferred, surrendered voluntarily, revoked by any outside force, or abrogated in any way.

As citizens of the nations of the Earth, we are guaranteed certain rights, some of which, like Freedom, are “inalienable”.

Slave contracts are not recognized among the nations of the Earth that recognize international law.

In the U.S. our inalienable rights include Freedom (which excludes slavery and includes freedom of speech), freedom to practice the religion of our own individual choice, and equal protection under the laws. According to Thomas Jefferson, the author of the American Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, the Pursuit of Happiness is also an inalienable right.

It is. It is called the military. No freedom for years on end.

No, I do not think voluntary slavery should be legalized. There’s just too much potential for abuse there.

There’s no need for voluntary slavery. We have plenty of excellent slavery without it.