Slavery....in Space!
- Thread starter kuros
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I really don't want to focus this conversation on real world events, but your perception about modern human resource management is pretty idealistic. Textile factories in China and Taiwan, Luxury mineral mining across Africa, drug cartels and coffee manufacturers, are all modern day industries which engage in a form of lateral expansion which is so close to indentured servitude as to make no difference.
Moving back to the safe fictional setting, if a single company owns the entire planet, including housing, power, telecommunications services, education and all forms of employment, then it will tend to make all of those services slightly more expensive than it is actually paying all of its employees. If you're in debt to the company you work for, which owns all of the services provided to you, you're an indentured servant.
Coal mining company towns stories are still told by the older generation where I grew up(SouthWest Virginia). Coal miners from that time were virtual peons in the sense that they couldn't leave their jobs due to "owing their soul to the company store." Same thing with Coal miners in England in the early 20th Century. IIRC there've been SciFi stories about "company serf/miners" based on similar themes. I can see something like that in Traveller. Some company raiding a isolated village to replace losses at a low-tech mining operation...
(Note that "wage slaves" as such aren't actually slaves)
How would raiding a town be cheaper than just hiring low wage workers? Plus the end result is less efficient; I just finished a class (which I paid thousands for) on Human Resource Management, with an emphasis on industrial labor; one thing we are taught in designing jobs is to make them so that the employee's self-esteem is connected through their employment with the company, providing a crucial intrinsic reward for their working for you, this self-esteem model provides for worker loyalty, higher productivity, motivation, etc. . With a slave, how does one do that? What is someone's self-esteem as a slave? The whip is an extrinsic motivator which is also shown to be one of the least effective; it is called a negative reward in HRM, something you take away as a reward, not to mention less than optimal effects on line managers that would be the ones with the whip, then you have extra security costs...the system just isn't economically viable, not compared to modern employment practices.
When debt contracts are enforced by the courts, they may as well be - especially if the contract is transferrable.
As coined by Manfred Cline, the cyborg concept envisioned the integration of biology and machine in order to make it possible for the organism to survive in environments that it was not originally suited for - as opposed to taking a chunk of your environment along with you. As near as I can tell, the Ship who Sang is pretty close to the ultimate expression of that idea. She may retain her physical form, but there is no survival for her without her shell and the equipment it plugs into.
http://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/Documents/Chapter1/cyborgs.pdf
And while she was indeed more in the role of indentured servant, the "what-if" I'm pointing to is: what if she wasn't? What if that technique were used to create cyborg slaves rather than indentured servants? Imagine being raised from birth in a shell designed not just to support you but also to reward and punish you - bad little borgs get migraines. Imagine overrides built into your equipment so that any rebellious act could be shut down immediately.
Not as well, perhaps, but given that some folk already make use of ... well, let's just say that some folk aren't too demanding and leave it at that. :devil:
That was one of the examples I was thinking of, in fact. I didn't know about the Vorkosigan angle though.
I vaguely recall an artificially modified H. Sapiens variant showing up in JTAS or somewhere, though I don't think they were slaves.
Sorry, but history doesn't agree with you. The Coal Mine companies of SouthWest Virgiinia were extremely profitable. But you're right, there are many different kinds of slavery but I can see specific instances of it being possible in a SciFi/Spacefaring Universe.
Modern coal is running in the 50-60 dollar range per ton. 1850-60 coal prices ranged from $10 to $5 per ton, about 1/5 to 1/10 modern prices. However, the 2012 dollar's worth roughly 1/13 the value of the 1860 dollar, meaning modern coal's a wee bit cheaper than it used to be when compared with other commodities instead of the dollar.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch: one well-paid, reasonably-educated man using a machine can bring up many times more coal than one slave using a pickax. Your Virginia today brings up more coal than the entire nation did in 1860. Yes, the man costs, and the machine costs, but the net profits to the company are just as good as they were, and many times more coal is being produced for the overall economy.
This is a consequence of increases in efficiency - and those increases can only be had from a skilled and adaptable workforce, which is not something that can be easily bought as slaves.
Having grown up there, this made me LoL...
Don't get me wrong, they're good people. Some of them very intelligent. Many of them in my family, but "reasonably-educated" isn't a term that I'd use lightly...
Let's see... slave cultures coming to mind immediately from Sci-Fi...
- Nessus enslaves Speaker to Animals/Chmee and Louis Wu in the Ringworld series.
- The Cateni enslave humanity in Anne McCaffrey's Freedom's ___ series
- The Planet Vulcan in the Sten Series. Company store.
- Doc, Frik and Frak in the Sten series - involuntary service with implanted behavior modifications to enforce it.
- The casino station in the Phule's Company series.
- Star Trek (if you can call ST Sci-Fi with a straight face)
- Orion Women
- Bajorans in ST: DS9 are enslaved by the Cardassians...
- Khan's ear-worms...
- Hundreds or thousands of species enslaved by the Borg
- Hutt Society in Star Wars (Even less Sci-Fi than Star Trek) :rofl:
- Pern by McCaffrey...
- Dragons on Pern very practically enslave some humans. Moreover, the Humans don't realize it. Worse, it's not even really intentional that the dragons enslave their bound humans - and they make the humans want that bond.
- Chattel apprenticeships
- serfdom in some minor holds
- Crystal cutters in McCaffrey's Crystal Singer series... the Ballybran Mining Consortium uses Crystal Thrall to keep them bound...
- Shell people in the Ship who Sang series (and it's close spinoff, City who fought). Again, McCaffrey. Indenture for survival and training.
- Boskone uses drug addiction to enthrall and enslave its agents in Lensmen.
- Several cultures are slave takers in Niven's Integral Trees and the Smoke Ring.
- A couple cultures in the Falkenberg's Legion series are slave takers of various kinds. The Col takes a really dim view of them...
- Justifiers RPG... Betas are human-animal hybrids... and slaves... and the manumission rules imposed by the civil rights agencies require that they be able to buy themselves back and must receive fair pay. Human Criminals can volunteer for the same. Combine criminal indenture, manufactured slave race with creation debt, and very mild company store mentality... great setting, but mediocre rules.
- Gor... going into detail violates good taste. Hell, Gor violates good taste. Bondage and slavery.
Anne McCaffrey examines loss of freedom in various guises in her novels... including company store, chattel apprenticeship, psionic bonding, survival indebtedness, and more.
The Enderverse examines several aspects of involuntary servitude and sophont sacrifice.
Slavery and related issues are COMMON themes in sci fi...
... and that's before you add horror elements, including Vampires, Zombies, and certain forms of parasitic mind controllers.
Are you sure?
Greylond is quite right on that... thing is, they were not profitable for the locals - the money went elsewhere. Right up until antitrust legislation and court decisions really nerfed the ability to enforce company store policies...
Truth is, slavery, serfdom, and indebtedness have always been profitable when not made expensive and/or unlawful by governmental or societal resistance.
Even with the rise of mechanization, tenant sharecroppers (effectively serfs) were cheaper than transient paid labor - in part, because they were present already, and bound to your own welfare because of having a share rather than a granted wage. They know that the harder they work, the more they gain from it. But then, government intervention resulted in sharecropping going away. Likewise, more rapid and affordable transport makes workers more able to travel between jobs, so fewer workers are needed overall, demand drops, and the price drops. Still, if it were legal, some industries would STILL use sharecropping.
Likewise, well treated slaves know that their comfort rests upon your success as well. And, to be honest, history shows clearly that slaves have always been better treated than hired hands, at least prior to worker's rights laws. An injured slave you send for the doctor. An injured hired worker you send home, and let him pay for the doctor. (At least, if your culture, religion or government don't require you to pay for your worker's doctor... which is a fairly modern innovation.)
Yep, that's what I was referring to. The local area did get some infrastructure built, but only what was needed for the mining operations.
One word on what destroyed the old company store system: Matewan.
The thing is, none of them were economically viable, that is why they are gone.
The Company Stores were not meant to be economically viable. They were a tool to control the workers. It was the Companies themselves that were extremely profitable.
And part of the point about SciFi "Slavery in Space" is that with a setup like in OTU an isolated company owned Star System without government oversight or other outside support isn't going to be ended by a worker's rebellion. All a company like that has to do is to end importation of supplies or some other choke. Or if they are careful not to let the news outsystem, nuke a site from orbit.
Actually, sounds to me like a pretty cool adventure seed. PCs are hired by some relatives/contacts after they received a smuggled out message about a slave family needing help to escape.
And part of the point about SciFi "Slavery in Space" is that with a setup like in OTU an isolated company owned Star System without government oversight or other outside support isn't going to be ended by a worker's rebellion. All a company like that has to do is to end importation of supplies or some other choke. Or if they are careful not to let the news outsystem, nuke a site from orbit.
Actually, sounds to me like a pretty cool adventure seed. PCs are hired by some relatives/contacts after they received a smuggled out message about a slave family needing help to escape.
The companies weren't profitable once they had to face the labor problems they created (which is why I mentioned the corporate structures disappeared). The new tools to control employees is HRM, it has dumped a huge amount of money into behavioral psychology research.
See there history is in real disagreement, eventually you face "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" or even worse, Bolsheviks. Even the game represents this on Dinom and Tanoose.
The companies adapted and moved on. As for being profitable, the fact that the original owners became millionaires/billionaires kinda disproves that...
Even after changing labor laws/regulations came about some of the companies stayed profitable by adapting quickly.
The companies adapted and moved on. As for being profitable, the fact that the original owners became millionaires/billionaires kinda disproves that...
Even after changing labor laws/regulations came about some of the companies stayed profitable by adapting quickly.
No, by the mid twenties, the whole coal industry in that area was collapsing.
After World War I, as the coal industry began to collapse...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
If there were any millionaires or billionaires involved, they didn't make it off of coal.
