[_jal]

Adding to this, there are employers who do what they can to ramp up the coercive aspect. This happens mainly in low-wage jobs where there is lots of usually low-quality labor. The usual dynamic is to seek out job hunters with family or other commitments to employ, and then constantly threaten them with all the people who apply. Make them feel trapped and precarious by threatening their ability to feed kids, and that can go a long way.

Obviously, the legal system no longer supports outright slavery outside of prison, and the tactics and conditions are consequently less severe than historic chattel slavery in the US.

But the opposite conclusion - that all labor is voluntary - has to use a specific sense of the word 'voluntary', more similar to the IRS definition than the picking-from-a-menu sense.