6 ms·

That they do this to unprotected populations is proof positive that if labor laws did not exist, employers would happily pay all us less and work us more.

• danuker 3y ago
  And yet, there still are illegal immigrants.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    Immigrants, legal or illegal, can walk out of jobs that are bad enough. Prisoners, by the sound of things, can't refuse even when it's an option on paper… and sometimes it isn't even an option in theory.
    • wahnfrieden 3y ago
      They can’t walk out when routinely under threat of deportation via retaliation often with business town managers and sheriffs partnered with ICE
      • ben_w 3y ago
        You think the threat of deportation is in any sense equivalent to solitary confinement or extra years in a prison sentence? To someone who immigrated for work, and decides that the specific and only work they're able to do thanks to how they arrived isn't worth it due to the pay and conditions, the threat of deportation is a very weak threat — more than literally nothing, but very very weak.
        • wahnfrieden 3y ago
          Many workers face death if sent back to their cartel-run homes. It’s convenient leverage for exploitative business I'm simply responding to "Immigrants, legal or illegal, can walk out of jobs that are bad enough.", not trying to make it a contest over degrees of slavery / indentured servitude
          • ben_w 3y ago
            Sounds it. However "many" is vague to the point of being useless. A hundred is many. And definitionally, there aren't good direct stats for how many illegal migrants there are, nor how they break down by how they got where they are now, only indirect proxies. What you can do is work backwards from the pay and conditions of those workers to make an educated guess about how much their bosses feel they need to keep their workers sweet. If it's more than the prisons pay, then no matter what else, the workers do in fact have more options than literal prisoners. Also, if they really do face death, theoretically there's this thing called "asylum" — though I assume political fights over that are at least as dumb in the US as in the UK.
            • wolverine876 3y ago
              Do you have personal experience or expertise about undocumented immigrants?
              • ben_w 3y ago
                > personal experience I believe so, but was hard to ask as they (plural) were begging on the street, some with hand-made signs, and none spoke good English or German. Now, my ex, she definitely had personal experience, she drove to the Calais Jungle to distribute donated supplies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calais_Jungle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calais_Jungle
                • wolverine876 3y ago
                  I admire your ex (if that's ok to say! :) ). > was hard to ask as they (plural) were begging on the street, some with hand-made signs, and none spoke good English or German. I'm also careful to presume someone is homeless, undocumented, etc. Also, not my business (that is, it is my responsibility to help but their personal lives aren't my business).
                  • ben_w 3y ago
                    > I admire your ex (if that's ok to say! :) ). She and I are still friends; she wanted to focus on activism rather than romance.