From Chains to Contracts: The Mistake in Calling Work Slavery

I spent years working nineteen emergency room shifts a month. I now work two. The difference between those two versions of my life is the whole argument I want to make here, so I’ll start with it.

For a long time I sold hours. Another shift, another paycheck. More nights, more money. That’s honest work, and it’s how almost everyone begins, me included. But it’s a straight line, and a straight line has a ceiling. There are only so many hours in a body. What changed my life wasn’t a raise. It was building something that produced value whether my own hands were moving or not. I left the big hospitals, opened freestanding ERs under iCare, and put my money into things that kept working while I slept. I’m more secure now on two shifts than I ever was on nineteen.

I bring that up not to brag but because it’s the exact thing the popular story about work leaves out. We’re often told the working person is trapped, that the system is rigged, that the boss is a kind of master. There’s real truth in that picture. But it’s a picture with no exit drawn into it, and I’ve walked out the door it says isn’t there. So I want to take the most powerful version of that story, the idea that modern low-wage work is a form of slavery, seriously, give it its due, and then say where I think it quietly fails the very people it’s trying to defend.

Why slavery existed in the first place

Slavery is usually treated first as a moral subject, and it should be. There are few human arrangements more obviously degrading than one person claiming ownership of another. But if we stop at moral judgment, we miss the colder historical question: why did slavery show up in so many societies, across so many centuries, in so many different forms?

The answer isn’t complicated. People needed labor, and power decided who would provide it.

Before engines and electricity and capital-intensive machinery, wealth came from land, animals, trade, conquest, and human muscle. Fields had to be planted. Stones had to be moved. Mines had to be worked. Armies had to be supplied. Someone had to do the work. And again and again, societies assigned that work to whoever had less power: prisoners of war, debtors, foreigners, conquered tribes, people born into the wrong legal category.

Slavery wasn’t invented as an abstract evil. It was invented as a practical solution. A brutal, dehumanizing one, but practical in the minds of the people who used it. That’s what makes the history so disturbing. Slavery didn’t survive because everyone involved misunderstood morality. It survived because it was useful to the people with power. It solved a labor problem and generated wealth, and it let one class live off the forced work of another.

In the ancient world it was usually tied to war, debt, punishment, or conquest. Greeks enslaved non-Greeks. Romans enslaved captives from across their empire. The legal details varied, but the structure was familiar: one person’s freedom was sacrificed to another’s convenience, status, or profit. Race wasn’t always the organizing principle. Power was. That distinction matters.

The racial slavery of the Atlantic world wasn’t just another version of this. It fused labor exploitation with race, inheritance, plantation capitalism, and a legal system built to make bondage permanent and hereditary. It produced an entire civilization of commerce, law, religion, violence, and pseudo-science designed to defend owning human beings. But the deeper pattern underneath it is older than race: societies have always looked for ways to secure labor at the lowest possible cost.

The same question, in different clothes

Slavery was one answer to that. Indentured servitude was another. So were debt bondage, serfdom, sharecropping, convict leasing, company towns, migrant labor, and modern low-wage work. These are not the same thing, and I want to be careful here, because pretending they’re equivalent is careless.

A slave and a low-wage worker are not morally, legally, or practically the same. A worker can quit. A slave could not. A worker has legal personhood; a slave was property. A worker can vote, sue, move, organize, or start over, at least in theory. A slave had none of that. Flattening the difference insults the people who actually lived in chains.

But these systems do belong in the same conversation, because each one asks a related question: how much freedom does a person really have when survival depends on accepting the terms offered by someone more powerful?

That question didn’t disappear when formal slavery ended. It just changed form. After abolition, the demand for cheap and controllable labor didn’t vanish. Crops still had to be picked, mines still needed men underground, factories still wanted long hours at low wages. So new arrangements appeared. Sharecropping tied freed people to land through debt. Convict leasing turned punishment into a labor supply. Company towns paid wages that flowed right back to the company store. Migrant systems moved desperate people across borders and used their vulnerability to keep them cheap. Modern employers can use unstable scheduling, immigration status, debt, noncompetes, or health insurance to keep people from walking away.

None of that is slavery in the literal sense. But it’s the same old temptation: find people with fewer options, and get their labor cheaply.

What’s true about wage slavery

This is where the phrase wage slavery comes in, and it’s meant to provoke. It says the low-wage worker isn’t truly free, not in any daily sense. He can technically quit, but rent is still due. Groceries still cost money. His kid still needs shoes. His car payment doesn’t care about philosophical freedom. So he goes back to work.

There’s truth in that, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Economic pressure is real. A person living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t experience the labor market as some elegant system of voluntary exchange. He experiences it as necessity. If missing two days means falling behind on rent, the freedom to quit is theoretical.

That’s why the argument has such emotional force. The image is easy to see. The worker is on the floor. He sweats, he picks up another shift, he misses dinner with his family. He trades time and his body for a fixed wage. Meanwhile the owner is on a beach, and the company makes money whether he shows up or not. The worker produces visible labor; the owner collects invisible income. That feels unfair.

And sometimes it is. Some owners are extractive. Some executives are wildly overpaid. Some companies really do squeeze workers to enrich people who contribute almost nothing. Some people inherit wealth and mistake it for genius. Some leaders hide behind the language of efficiency while treating human beings as disposable inputs. There’s no need to pretend that isn’t real. I’ve worked inside big hospital systems. I’ve felt like a line item. I know exactly what it’s like to be scheduled without control and spoken to like a tool.

Where the frame fails

But here’s the problem. The slavery comparison does something subtle and damaging: it freezes everyone in place.

The worker is always the worker. The owner is always the owner. The system is a fixed hierarchy, not a game people can move through. And once the worker is framed as a slave to the system, the only moves left are to demand a better deal inside the system: a higher wage, better benefits, safer conditions, more leave, a union contract, a bigger slice of the value he produces.

Those aren’t trivial demands. Many are completely justified. A society that runs on workers owes them dignity, safety, and enough stability to live a decent life. I’m not against any of that. But notice that every one of those demands keeps the worker a worker. The owner stays an owner. The game stays the game. The frame almost never asks the more dangerous question: how does the worker stop being only a worker?

That’s where it fails. It can wake up anger, but it can also kill imagination. It teaches the worker to see the owner as a master rather than as proof that ownership is possible. It teaches him to resent profit without understanding how profit is made, and if you never understand how profit is made, you can never reliably make it for yourself.

The owner on the beach looks like a villain because he’s making money while other people work. But that image cuts out everything that happened before the beach. Someone had to start the business, or buy it, or inherit it and not run it into the ground, which is harder than people think. Someone signed the lease, borrowed the money, personally guaranteed the debt, made the first payroll, found the first customers, survived the slow months, ate the lawsuits and the mistakes. Maybe he did all of it. Maybe almost none of it. Maybe he was brilliant, maybe lucky, maybe ruthless, maybe just standing in the right place when the market moved. Cases vary.

But ownership itself isn’t parasitism. It’s a different kind of work, the work of organizing labor, capital, risk, timing, judgment, and relationships into something bigger than one person could build alone. Nobody builds much alone, and that’s the part people don’t like to say out loud. Every real enterprise needs other people: employees, vendors, customers, investors, operators. The discomfort starts when one person organizes the whole machine and then collects an outsized reward from the work of the group. But that’s also the point. The reward isn’t for the owner’s hours. It’s for building or controlling the machine that lets labor multiply.

Labor and leverage

This is the reframe I’d put in place of master and slave: labor and leverage.

The person selling hours works in a straight line. More hours, more money. Another shift, another paycheck. It’s honest, it’s necessary, and it’s how nearly everyone starts. Ownership works differently. Ownership is an attempt to break the link between your income and your hands. A good owner builds a system where people, capital, equipment, process, reputation, and judgment produce value together, and if the system works, his income stops depending only on his own body moving.

Critics call that the unfair part. But it’s also the part almost everyone secretly wants. Nobody dreams of being paid only when their hands are moving. People want savings, investments, rental income, equity, a business, a book that sells while they sleep, a clinic that runs when they’re not in the building. Everyone wants leverage. Owners are just people who found a way to get some.

I know this one personally, because it’s the whole arc of my career. I came to medicine the long way. I wanted to be a doctor from the time I was five, drifted off it as a teenager, got rejected from a job at nineteen I was sure I wanted, and wound up back in a biology class almost by accident. For years after that, I was pure labor: a physician selling shifts, where the only lever I had was to work more of them. Then I started building. The freestanding ERs, the systems behind them, the investments, every one of them was an attempt to turn my knowledge and my risk into something that didn’t require my hands on it. Early in your career you’re surviving the system. Later, if you’ve built right, you can start to bend it. That’s not a slogan to me. It’s the difference between nineteen shifts and two.

A nurse can become a nurse practitioner. A technician can become a manager. A cook can become a chef. Those are real improvements, and they raise your wage. But they’re still inside labor. The bigger leap is from labor to leverage, using tools, capital, people, systems, code, brand, or knowledge to produce more value than your own hours can. A worker without leverage adds. A person with leverage multiplies. That’s the actual way out of the cage. Not for everyone, not overnight, not without risk or luck or failure, but it’s the path the wage-slavery frame keeps forgetting to mention.

Deserve is the wrong word

Sooner or later this argument runs into the word deserve. Does the owner deserve more than the worker?

Most people answer it emotionally. They picture the hardest-working person they can think of, the janitor mopping floors at midnight, the warehouse worker wrecking his back, the single mother on two jobs, the nurse picking up another shift, and set him against an executive checking email between cocktails at a resort. Put that way, the answer seems obvious. No, the owner doesn’t deserve it.

But deserve is doing too much work. Do we mean moral worth? Then wealth is a terrible yardstick; some poor people are saints and some rich people are monsters, and the reverse is true too. Do we mean effort? That fails, a ditch digger may work harder than a surgeon. Do we mean risk? Closer, but not the whole story; workers risk their bodies, owners risk their capital, and neither should be waved off. Do we mean value created? That’s probably the closest economic answer, but even that’s hard to measure. A good manager creates value by preventing chaos. A founder creates value by seeing an opportunity early. None of that looks like work in the factory-floor sense, and all of it can be worth far more than another hour of labor.

So maybe deserve is the wrong starting point. A better question: did the person create, organize, risk, or maintain something that other people voluntarily take part in because it gives them value? If yes, the reward isn’t automatically theft. It might still be excessive, distorted by monopoly, political favors, inheritance, regulatory capture, fraud, or raw bargaining power. Those are real problems, and profit isn’t holy. But profit by itself isn’t proof of exploitation. Often it’s the signal that someone organized resources so they were worth more together than apart. That’s not evil. That’s most of civilization.

The part where I keep myself honest

It would be childish to say every worker can just decide to become an owner tomorrow. People have different talents, obligations, health, education, risk tolerance, family backstops, access to capital, and luck. A single parent with no savings can’t always just start a business. A sick worker chained to an employer’s health insurance is not living in the same world as a twenty-five-year-old with no dependents and a rich uncle. I had advantages and timing that not everyone gets, and I’d be lying to pretend grit alone explains it.

Society also can’t function if everyone exits wage labor at once. We need people who show up, do the task, keep the thing running, and go home. Not everyone wants to own a company, and not everyone should. Some people want stability more than upside. Some want a craft, not a payroll. There’s real dignity in that, and a worker deserves fair wages and safe conditions regardless of whether he ever wants to own anything.

So the point isn’t that every worker must become an entrepreneur. The point is that we should be careful with stories that teach people they’re permanently trapped. A worker deserves a fair wage. He also deserves a picture of himself that’s bigger than wage negotiation.

Leverage carries a moral weight

If I stopped here, it’d be too clean. Learn the game, build a system, escape the trap. But leverage isn’t morally neutral once you have it, and this is the thread that actually connects slavery, indenture, low-wage labor, and modern ownership. The forms differ; the temptation is the same. When another person’s labor becomes a line item, headcount, labor cost, utilization, benefits burden, it gets easier to stop seeing the person.

Those are necessary terms. You can’t run a business without measuring labor; I measure it every month. But measurement flattens people. A spreadsheet doesn’t show the worker’s sore back, sick kid, or fear. The same leverage that lets a good owner build wealth lets a bad one hide exploitation behind abstraction. A plantation ledger didn’t have to describe suffering to turn a profit. A modern staffing model doesn’t have to describe burnout to hit a margin.

So the answer isn’t to worship ownership. It’s to understand it, pursue it where you can, and carry into it a memory of what labor actually feels like. The best owner isn’t the one who forgot being a worker, it’s the one who remembers. Remembers being scheduled without control, spoken to like a tool, underpaid, watched by someone who didn’t understand the job, told we’re a family by people who’d cut hours the second revenue dipped. That memory is the whole reason I built iCare the way I did. I didn’t just want somewhere to practice; I wanted to build the structure that lets physicians have a life, because no one had built that for me. A person who escapes wage labor only to recreate the same humiliations for other people hasn’t transcended the system. He just changed seats.

That’s why the goal shouldn’t be to become a master. That word is poisoned for a reason. The goal is to become a builder, someone who makes something that didn’t exist, organizes people and capital and ideas into productive form, earns profit without earning it only by squeezing, and treats the people inside the thing as participants rather than raw material. That’s not idealism. It’s practical. Teams with trust and dignity perform better. People who are trained, respected, and given a path create more value than people treated as disposable. The moral argument and the business argument are not always enemies.

Nobody is independent anyway

Part of why the slavery metaphor sticks is that people want independence. They want to believe real freedom means needing no one. But that kind of freedom barely exists. The worker depends on the employer and the employer on the worker. The business depends on the customer and the customer on the business. The surgeon depends on nurses, techs, anesthesia, sterilization, scheduling, billing, and a whole building of systems he didn’t build. I depend on every person who keeps my ERs running. No one is independent, not really.

So the question was never whether we depend on others. It’s what kind of dependence we live inside. Slavery is dependence enforced by violence and ownership. Indenture is dependence enforced by contract. Debt bondage is dependence enforced by obligation. Low-wage work is dependence enforced by economic necessity. Ownership is dependence reorganized through responsibility, risk, and control. None of these are identical, but all of them remind us that human beings live in networks of need. The fantasy is escaping dependence. The mature goal is better dependence, dependence with rights, with mobility, with dignity, with the real possibility of ownership, where people can move, learn, bargain, build, and leave.

What I’d teach instead

If the wage-slavery frame is incomplete, what replaces it? Not blind capitalism, not hustle harder, not billionaire worship, and definitely not the fantasy that every poor person is one mindset shift from generational wealth. That stuff is insulting.

What I’d teach is economic literacy with agency. Teach workers how businesses actually make money: margins, pricing, sales, debt, taxes, equity, management, risk. Teach the difference between revenue and profit. Teach why some jobs pay more than others, and how scarce skills create bargaining power. Teach people how to negotiate, how to read a basic financial statement, how customer relationships become assets, how small businesses are bought and sold, and how ownership can be earned, shared, financed, or built slowly. Teach them that a job can be both a paycheck and a classroom, that a bad boss is a case study, a broken process is an opportunity, a frustrated customer is a signal. Once you see work that way, resentment gets some competition. Curiosity walks in. That’s when movement becomes possible.

And teach them that the person above them isn’t a different species. Sometimes he’s smarter; sometimes he just understands the game better, or had advantages, or got lucky, or took a risk, or is honestly mediocre and sitting in a chair someone better could fill. If you imagine the owner as a separate kind of creature, ownership becomes psychologically off-limits. It belongs to them, not us. The worker may hate the owner, but he won’t study him, won’t ask what skills or capital or risk built that position. Condemnation feels good. Study is more useful. The point isn’t to excuse bad owners. It’s to make ownership less mysterious, because once it’s understandable, it becomes imitable, not by everyone, not equally, not easily, but far more often than if we teach people only to resent it.

Floor and ceiling

A serious politics of work should care about two things at once.

First, the floor. People shouldn’t be crushed for lacking leverage. Work should be safe. Wages should be livable where possible. Fraud should be punished, monopolies challenged, the right to organize protected. Health care shouldn’t be a shackle, and kids shouldn’t inherit permanent disadvantage because their parents were poor. A society that ignores the floor turns cruel.

But second, the ceiling. People should be taught how to rise, not only through credentials, but through ownership, equity, management, investing, and control of productive assets. They should see the path from labor to leverage with examples close enough to touch: the nurse who opened a clinic, the mechanic who bought the shop, the operator who became a partner, the employee who negotiated equity, the immigrant family that built a service business one account at a time. A society that talks only about the floor can become safe but stagnant. People need dignity where they are and a path beyond where they are. That’s the balance the wage-slavery frame keeps missing. It’s so focused on the injustice of the current position that it forgets the person inside it can change.

The worker deserves a map

Calling modern low-wage work slavery is powerful rhetoric. It shocks people. It forces attention onto coercion and inequality. But it smuggles in a terrible assumption: that the worker’s identity is fixed. The slave couldn’t become the master. That’s the nature of slavery; the system forbids it. The worker can become something else. Not always, not easily, not without help, and not without a society that leaves some doors open. But the possibility is real, and the possibility is the whole point. Erase it, and you may think you’re honoring workers by naming their oppression when you’re actually shrinking their imagination.

The old world used chains. The modern world uses contracts, debt, credentials, schedules, incentives, health insurance, habits, and fear. Some of those tools are legitimate, some are abusive, most are complicated. But the escape was never just to make the contract kinder. The escape is to understand the contract, understand the system behind it, and eventually gain the power to write different terms. That’s hard. It’s a lot harder than telling people the only future on offer is a slightly better bargain with their current master.

I’ve stood on both sides of this. I sold my hours, and then I learned to build. The thing I most want anyone still selling hours to hear is the thing nobody told me early enough:

The worker deserves more than a raise. He deserves a map.

Shane Cole, MD. Emergency medicine physician and Managing Partner of CAM Innovative Services