Is indebted labor a form of modern slavery? Debt, subjection, and the crisis of collective action in the Global North

This study develops a debt-centered account of indebted labor under financialized capitalism and traces its implications for union decline in the Global North. Indebted labor is not modern slavery. It is a distinct position between classical wage labor and debt bondage, identified along four dimensions: debt-service dependence, temporal capture, credit-score exposure, and collective-action risk asymmetry. The argument develops in two steps. The first compares indebted labor with Orlando Patterson’s three components of slavery; the analogy proves categorically invalid but structurally revealing on the dimension of generalized dishonor. The second identifies three mutually reinforcing mechanisms through which debt weakens union action: risk individualization, the narrowing of temporal horizons, and the moralization of repayment. Their combined operation produces an emergent consequence, the rising cost of collective action. Debt is not only an economic burden. It is a technology of subjection that reorganizes the conditions under which labor politics becomes thinkable.