system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: paying some only enough (or not even enough) to live pay check to pay check is the same thing as slavery.

This idea just popped into my head and I know it has to be ridiculous but I can't put my finger on why.  When I say minimum wage worker, I am obviously referring to an unlivable minimum wage.

Before the civil war, slaves who worked on plantations obviously didn't earn a salary, but they did recieve room and board from their masters.  This was necessary for them to stay alive and you don't want your slaves to die on you, but the room and food were normally very sub par.  

A modern day minimum wage worker normally lives in a small, run down apartment that they can barely afford and if they're lucky they have a bit of paycheck left over after buying food and paying rent to pay a few other bills with.

These are both the same situation.  The only difference is the minimum wage worker's employer is indirectly providing bare-bones food and housing instead of directly providing it, as the slave master did.  Now there are a few very obvious differences.  

For one, the minimum wage worker can do whatever they please with their free time and go wherever they like, unlike the slave.  But most min-wage workers I know of don't have the luxury of free time.  They're situation forces them to work far more than forty hours a week and on the weekends, and more often than not they've also got a kid or two that needs taking care of, so while they technically can do what they please in their free time, they don't actually have any free time, making that point moot.

Secondly, they min-wage worker has the right to quit their job whenever they like, unlike a slave.  Again though, the situation they are in, living pay check to pay check, never being sure if there's going to be enough money at the end of the week, puts them in such an unstable situation that quitting their job is unthinkable, and they don't even have the time to look for something better.  So technically yes, the law allows them to quit, but in reality that is almost never an option.  

Finally, of course the min-wage worker has rights.  They have the right to vote, to free speech, to peaceful demonstration, etc etc.  I hate to bring up the whole "unstable situation" card for a third time, but what good are these rights if they have no time to practice them?  We just had an election here in the US and I saw a few discussions on Reddit about voter suppression and how min-wage workers can't afford to lose the hours it takes to go vote.  They can't even do that, they definitely can't afford to go to any protests or something like that.  Of course there are other rights/government regulations that apply to the workplace, like health codes and of course you can't beat or whip your workers.  But that is the only real difference I can see between a slave and a minimum wage worker.
gpt
The thing that defines a slave more than anything is the lack of freedom of choice. When you're a slave, most every decision has been made for you. The people you describe have choices they make. They can choose not to work, they can choose to spend their time just hanging out. It would be really foolish of them to do so, and most won't decide this, but it's a choice no less.

You could argue that slaves had the "choice" to be defiant to their masters, but these aren't really comparible.