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

The Nazis regarded their ghettos as temporary concentration camps, and starving the Jews engaged in slave labor there was official policy. —Martin Kimel, Baltimore Sun, 26 Jan. 2025

Churchill had warned that the Soviet Union’s practices of state trading and slave labor would drive competitors under. —Katherine Tai, Foreign Affairs, 9 Jan. 2025

Several Fortune 500 companies, including Apple, Samsung, Nestlé and Nike, have been charged with or admitted to using slave labor. —Monti Datta, The Conversation, 9 Jan. 2025

But the true evil, the rot that created them, is something embedded in society and the dream of Rome, which, much like the American dream, could not be built without conquest and slave labor. —Richard Newby, The Hollywood Reporter, 26 Nov. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1802, in the meaning defined at sense 1