Unfree labor

Unfree is a classification of labor covering a broad spectrum of workers from forced enslavement to indentured servitude, including those who are unpaid or unable to exercise freedom of movement. This includes serfdom, sharecropping, and corvée (forced labor for intermittent periods)—of someone entrapped in a tenacious economic web. The laborer wants to leave but is forced to remain by violent force, threat of arrest, punishment under the law, destitution, and rules and regulations of employment, making it an extreme hardship to break the bonds. Forced labor does not include a national draft for compulsory military service or public service; labor performed under criminal court order as part of sentencing, so long as laborers are not contracted to an individual, a private company, or third party; or when the government forces private individuals into service during times of emergency, calamity, and disasters. Likewise, it is not considered unfree labor when an individual volunteers to perform normal civic functions in service to the community.

Background

Some 3,500 years ago, the Israelites from Canaan migrated to Egypt as freemen. Later, according to the Bible, they were enslaved for four hundred years. They received subsistence as compensation from their masters and were forced into hard labor on building Pharaoh’s projects. Punishment measures changing into persecution—like killing first-born Hebrew male babies—were extreme.

Another form of unfree labor in the Bible is the Hebrew eved: a male who receives no wages is a member of the household; his master exercises patria potestas (the power of the head of the family) for six years maximum. The master retains ownership of the female mate and property rights of the eved.

Slavery was common throughout history, in many cultures across nearly all continents. Chattel slavery in the Americas began with Spanish conquistadors and British armies enslaving native populations, sometimes with genocidal efficiency. Europeans and Arabs turned slavery into a powerful economic industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, comprising the capture, sale, transportation, and ownership of African people. Slavery was institutionalized in America, lasting until the Civil War in the 1860s.

Debtors and thieves worked as unfree or forced laborers, voluntarily selling themselves into bondage. Indentured servitude is a classification of unfree laborers who, for a specified amount of time, are not free to quit without repaying debts incurred to employers for passage to a desired country, visas, legal fees, accommodations, and sustenance. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of poor people flocked to British colonies. They fled extreme poverty, the ravages of famine, and religious hatred, enticed by promises of opportunities for political, economic, and religious freedom. Half the White people in American colonies were indentured servants. English and French children were being kidnapped and sold into indentured servitude on Caribbean sugar plantations. They were forbidden to marry without permission, subject to physical punishment; their contracts were enforced by courts; their terms of indenture lengthened; and they could be sold before the contracts ended.

White criminals found their way to Australia (Fiji, New Caledonia, and Samoa) before 1840, serving as indentured servants, while native non-Whites were enslaved. The British brought indentured servant coolies from India to Africa to work on railways, dams, and plantations. Between 1918 and the 1980s, the Gulag was forced unfree labor camps in the Soviet Union, where 14 million people were sent.

Unfree Labor Today

Sharecropping, which is as ancient as farming and landholding, still exists in Pakistan, India, and some African countries. A tenant uses the land owned by another person or the government in return for a share of the crops at harvest. Crop sharing is especially popular among the poor unable to buy land and pay rent. It is unfree labor when landholders rent farming equipment to sharecroppers, sell items through company stores at exorbitant prices, and the government tax authorities take more from the sharecroppers than from landholders. Until the nineteenth century climaxing with the Russian Revolution, serfdom was forced labor, a condition of bondage, with the serf tied down to one area. If the land was sold, the serfs were sold with it in a concept emanating from the tenth-century Roman Empire. China restricted the movement of villatic peasants (nearly 10 percent of the population) working state lands into the 1900s.

The greatest, single, organized dragooning of forced labor in the history of mankind was by the Nazi government throughout occupied Europe during World War II. From 1938 to 1945, the German Nazis and their acolytes exploited as forced labor 15 million men, women, and children from twenty countries. They worked these civilians to death in slave labor camps, concentration camps, and government and privately owned factories making weapons and goods for the Nazi military. Eleven million individuals (including six million Jews) perished from malnutrition, torture, murder, and impossible working conditions. Hitler’s policy began with Lebensraum, the conquest of territory for unfree labor to replace men off to war and make cheap goods for the German people to bond them with the Nazi regime. Japan, Hitler’s ally, engaged in forced labor of Koreans and most of the Pacific peoples Japan conquered. The Nazis forced women as unfree labor into brothels, while the Japanese institutionalized the practice with the sobriquet military comfort women.

In the twenty-first century, it is estimated that twenty-seven million enslaved individuals are working in sweatshops, as domestics and farm help, and are trafficked for sex. Young women are recruited as indentured servants from Asia and Eastern Europe with promises of freedom once the expenses are paid. Many cross borders illegally and are forced to work for little or no pay; they are beaten, caged, raped, and their families are threatened if these young women refuse to work. While some definitions of unfree labor vary from place to place, what is common is that unfree laborers are entrapped, impoverished within bondage, and face barriers to exit the labor contract. Slavery continues in Arab countries like Sudan and Mauritania (estimated as 100,000 individuals), despite being legally abolished in 1981. Myanmar (Burma) corvées are unfree, unpaid mandatory laborers. Some observers suggest that in advanced and developing nations unfree and forced labor is on the decline, even in human trafficking for sex. More than three dozen national and international organizations, like the International Rescue Committee, are engaged in the fight against unfree labor.

Bibliography

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Homze, Edward L. Forced Labor in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press, 1967.

Jacobs, Charles, and Ben Poser. "Arab Enslavement and Slaughter of Black Africans Must Stop." Tablet, 11 Dec. 2023, www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/arab-enslavement-black-africans. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025.

"Jewish Concepts: Slavery." Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/slavery-in-judaism. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025. 

Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Harvard University Press, 1987.

Kratoska, Paul H., ed. Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories. Routledge, 2015. 

Olsen, Wendy, and Jamie Morgan. "The Entrapment of Unfree Labor: Theory and Examples from India." Journal of Developing Societies. Sage Publications. 31. 2 (2015): 184-203. Web. 6 Feb. 2025.

Moore, A. "10 Facts About the Arab Enslavement of Black People Not Taught In Schools." Atlanta Blackstar. AtlantaBlackStar.com, 2 June 2014. Web. 6 Feb. 2025.