A Boring Dystopia

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Thousands could be coerced into "unpaid labor" in Louisiana under new bill | HB 211 would make sleeping outdoors in public illegal and force unhoused people to "choose" between prisons and workhouses (www.newsweek.com)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by stabby_cicada@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world

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“HB 211 is a debt trap. It creates a population of people who are, by definition, unable to pay. And then converts that inability into a labor obligation,” Michael Ryan, a finance expert and founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek. “The ‘streets to success’ framing is deliberate misdirection. No legitimate treatment program requires the patient to work off their bill under threat of incarceration."

I'm morbidly fascinated by how carefully this article avoids using the obvious term. But slavery. It's slavery. It is a bill that would literally, legally, enslave a population (of predominantly Black men, fucking surprise) for the "crime" of being poor.

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[–] fizzle@quokk.au 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Can you give me some examples of that physical work?

Im sure there are things, but most things I think of can be done very efficiently by a machine with a skilled operator for less than it would cost to force unpaid labourers to do.

[–] MeatPilot@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Sure, I work with printers and suppliers a lot. A vast majority of what they do requires "temp workers" usually low paid people or even disabled adults with down syndrome to do a part of the process that would be much more costly to retool a machine to do or too expensive to build something that does it. Like folding and filling perfume boxes of various sizes, shapes.

Also the same kind of labor was used to pack over a million bags of various items because making a machine grab or move a changing inventory is just too expensive and having a machine that does one thing than never do it again is wasteful.

Really it's a balance between what costs more people or designing and/or resetting a machine for the job. A lot of times bringing in a group of low-paid people for a few months is much much less than a machine. People have more flexible parts.