Indentured Servitude Has Already Penetrated Deep into the American Heartland. By Thom Hartmann
Indentured servitude
is back in a big way in the United States, and conservative corporatists want
to make sure that labor never, ever again has the power to tell big business
how to treat them. Idaho,
for example, recently passed a law that recognizes and rigorously enforces
non-compete agreements in employment contracts, which means that if you want to
move to a different, more highly paid, or better job, you can instead get wiped
out financially by lawsuits and legal costs.
In a way,
conservative/corporatists are just completing the circle back to the founding
of this country.
Indentured servitude
began in a big way in the early 1600s, when the British East India Company was
establishing a beachhead in
the (newly stolen from the Indians) state of Virginia (named after the “virgin
queen” Elizabeth I, who signed the charter of the BEIC creating the first
modern corporation in 1601). Jamestown (named after King James, who followed
Elizabeth I to the crown) wanted free labor, and the African slave trade
wouldn’t start to crank up for another decade.
So the company made a
deal with impoverished Europeans: Come to work for typically 4-7 years (some
were lifetime indentures, although those were less common), legally as the
property of the person or company holding your indenture, and we’ll pay for
your transport across the Atlantic. It was, at least
philosophically, the logical extension of the feudal economic and political
system that had ruled Europe for over 1,000 years. The rich have all the rights
and own all the property; the serfs are purely exploitable free labor who could
be disposed of (indentured
servants, like slaves, were commonly whipped, hanged, imprisoned, or killed
when they rebelled or were not sufficiently obedient).
This type of labor
system has been the dream of conservative/corporatists, particularly since the
“Reagan Revolution” kicked off a major federal war on the right of workers to
organize for their own protection from corporate abuse… read more:
http://www.alternet.org/labor/indentured-servitude-returns-americaSumit Guha - Glimpsed in the Archive and Known no More: One Indian Slave’s Tale
