slave labor

noun

variants US slave labor or chiefly British slave labour

1

: work that is done by enslaved people or by people who are treated as though they are enslaved

prisoners being forced to do slave labor

a slave labor camp

2

: enslaved people doing work

The pyramids were built by slave labor.

slave laborer noun

(chiefly US) or chiefly British slave labourer

plural slave laborers

… The Statue of Freedom—the figure of a Native American woman warrior that stands on the dome—was cast in bronze by slave laborers in 1863 and hoisted up there.

—Jack E. White

Examples of slave labor in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Proponents maintain that these programs are engines of integration, while critics slam them as slave labor and little more than populist attempts by regional authorities to woo back voters drifting to the far right. —Kate Brady, Washington Post, 13 July 2024

Others place the blame on a trans-Atlantic economic system that simultaneously enriched Southern white planters and Northern merchants on the profits of the slave trade and slave labor. —Eli Merritt, TIME, 4 July 2024

By then, the economies of the two lands were deeply intertwined, with American slave ships supplying most of the African captives brought to Cuba and American merchants buying most of the island’s sugar, rum, and tobacco—all of it produced with slave labor. —Jon Lee Anderson, Foreign Affairs, 14 Dec. 2021

This win represents a measure of justice for those Uyghurs and other Turkic people who have been tortured and subjected to slave labor there. —Kate Nishimura, Sourcing Journal, 3 Sep. 2019

Word History

First Known Use

1802, in the meaning defined at sense 1