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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[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Farming and sewing. Both involve manual laborers that's unpleasant and not yet able to be automated. There's also some assembly work that amounts to loading and unloading things in machines or inspecting things that come out of machines. Then you've also got a lot of building of more complicated machines like cars.

There's more I'm sure, but that's a lot of the stuff I can think of as an industrial engineer.

Oh also unpleasant service labor like call center work and content moderation. And don't discount pointless labor. Or labor that could be automated, but it's cheaper to pay prisoners to do it since the state subsidizes their care.