unfree labor
Work without choice
Unfree labor is work performed under compulsion rather than voluntary agreement—slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, prison labor, debt bondage.
The term appears in historical and economic contexts to distinguish coerced work from free wage labor: The plantation economy depended on unfree labor.
Unfree labor persists in various forms worldwide.
- convict leasingHiring out imprisoned people
- chain gangShackled convict work crew
- abolitionismMovement to end oppression
- slaveryOwnership of people
- migrant workersPeople moving for jobs
serfdom · human trafficking · human cargo · penal servitude · impressment · peonage · systemic inequality · encomienda · chattel slavery · plantation system · cotton fields · intergenerational trauma · debt bondage · sex trafficking · vagrancy laws · wage theft · indentured servitude · conscript
unfree laborwage labor
Work exchanged for payment
voluntary work · self-employment · at-will employment · freelance work · contract labor