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

Often sustainability no longer implies that slave labor wasn’t deployed, or that there hasn’t been a purposeful reduction in the tuna population, but instead that there has been some vague dialogue entered into about not willfully raping the planet. —Louis J. Esterhazy, Footwear News, 11 Oct. 2025

This is due to the cotton plant’s association with transatlantic slave labor. —Jessica Bennett, VIBE.com, 26 Sep. 2025

That requires mining all over the planet, much of it involving widespread destruction of croplands and wildlife habitats, extensive child and slave labor, and enormous amounts of toxic air and water pollution. —Craig Rucker, Boston Herald, 26 Sep. 2025

What regulated actual Southern credit markets, when bondpeople were used as collateral for loans, were surpluses from slave labor, not short-term fluctuations in slave prices. —Literary Hub, 22 Sep. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1802, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for slave labor

• belabor
• nonlabor
• neighbor
• neighbour
• saber
• sabre
• tabor