h could afford quite a few slaves, as servants and personal assistants, and as extra labour for use in their various business interests. Even the moderately well-off should be able to afford one or two. Slavery would not always be cheaper than employment of independent contractors, but it would provide another alternative to waged employment, alongside and supplementing exploitation of contract labour. One currently fashionable way of avoiding the high cost of employment in the fashion trade, for example, is to contract with a seamstress to sew shirts at home, paying a pittance for each shirt sewn. Limitations on working hours, sick pay, occupational health and safety standards and all the other costs of usual employment can be side-stepped, with contractors forced to work eighteen or more hours a day. Slavery would not replace this practice, but complement it where it would be useful to have a long-term, reliable, supply of labour for any purpose that a master might desire. Manifestly, then, a new institution of voluntary slavery would be capable of soaking up the permanently unemployed and underemployed into useful service to the rich and well-off.Many accept that the pressures of globalisation and technological change mean that governments cannot provide employment where the private sector has failed to. But though there may not be enough real jobs to go round, there is nevertheless a virtually unlimited amount of work that those of us who are relatively well-off would like to have done if only it could be done for virtually nothing. Cleaning. Cooking. Gardening. Serving. Fetching. Carrying. Slaves would be ideally suited to these forms of servile labour. Slavery would open up a whole new dimension of useful service work for those now suffering the enforced idleness of unemployment. One of the curses of unemployment is the sense of uselessness, of not being socially needed, that attends it. Voluntary slaves, on the other hand, would ...
