The belief that free labor is better than forced labor is one of the ethical certainties of our age. Slavery is now a crime, not an economic institution, and the very use of the terms “forced” and “free”—one evoking whips, the other wages—is proof that a moral argument has been won. Yet the triumph of free labor is historically incomplete, and hardly innocent. In much of the global economy, work is unsafe or unrewarding, and “slave wages” are the only compensation laborers can expect; millions of people still work against their will, for no real wages at all, under conditions that can only be described as slavery. The line between forced and free labor continues to shift, and two of our authors explore historical contexts in which this line was drawn differently, producing moral dilemmas that still shape our understanding of human labor as a domain of choice and constraint.
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