[gdulli]

Before we had modern labor and lived indoors we may not have had employers, but we still had to leave our family to go hunt. No vacations from that. And sometimes the animals would win and we'd die.

And then modern labor started to take form and employees had many fewer protections than they have today.

So let's call the history of labor "barbaric" and recognize the situation today is still not ideal, but improved enough that we need a less dramatic word to describe it.