[mbel]

> Many a slave in the past (again, excluding US) was in much better situation than your average friendly neighbourhood supermarket clerk.

Unless you are using some exotic definition of enslavement, there is a fundamental difference between slave an employee. A slave is a property of his owner [0], thus slave has no agency and is completely dependent on her/his owner decisions. Employee may choose to be dependent on her/his employer to any extent she/he chooses, but it is her/his choice. You may argue that both slave and employer may end up being completely dependent on her/his owner/employer, but from the point of view of the law and society the situation is always completely different.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

[ptaffs]

There are other ways of enforced labour as well as slavery, and some are quite close to home. Indentured workers, and poor houses for example, and the company scrip, are slightly less brutal forms of something similar to slavery, as are workers in the penal system. In all of these systems the workers aren't really able to walk away from their "owner". And some of this is fairly recent involving Ikea [4] and Walmart [5].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/business/global/ikea-to-re... [5] http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/09/05/mexico-walmex-idUS...