By your definition, America never had slavery. After all, these workers may have been held to high standards, but they were paid in food, lodging and clothing.

This is what's happening: Westerners want new kicks every six months. Thats a lot of shoes and someone has to build them. And they need to be cheap so everyone who wants one can have one. So the westerners go someplace where people are starving, and they offer them something. Anything. What you'd give a white man at home 15 bucks an hour for, you pay these poor fucks 5 bucks a week. And they'll jump at it because it means at least some food on the table, a roof over the head and a shirt on your back. Even if you, your wife and your children all have to work 16 hour days for it.

Perhaps you could find work at another factory, owned by another corporation, but the conditions there are exactly the same. There's a "free market" - and everybody has decided to graciously offer you one percent of what they would offer somebody in their own country.

You're never going to do anything else, and your children arent either because there's no time to go school. they have to work. and that's good, because it ensures a steady stream of shoes that are 10 bucks to produce and 100+ to sell, which is great fr the shareholders and the stock market, and that's what the Western world is fretting about. Dumb brown people in places we can't pronounce? We joke about them, if we don't build racist narratives proving white superiority on the basis that these people are dumb, have no Nobel prizes, and never went to space.

You're saying its not slavery because there's a monetary transaction of some sorts, as opposed to a transaction of tangible goods and services such as food and lodging.

I'm saying its slavery even if the slaveholder decides that the logistics of providing food and lodging for as many people as he's exploiting are too inefficient.

The people may not legally be owned by anyone, but they work to survive. They cannot get out. They cannot move up, not even in the next generation. They're owned by the system.