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

Choloma's garment factories have capitalized on retailers and fashion brands seeking to divest from China as a result of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a U.S. law aimed at blocking the importation of goods produced by slave labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur region of China. —Rick Barrett, Journal Sentinel, 12 June 2024

In China, which controls 80 percent of all solar panel manufacturing, the solar industry relies on Uyghur slave labor. —Dj Nordquist, Foreign Affairs, 12 Jan. 2023

In 2015, The Associated Press revealed the wide use of slave labor in the Thai shrimp industry. —Erik Vance, New York Times, 28 May 2024

Among the first shareholders of the university were tobacco farmers and plantation owners who relied on slave labor. —Lilly Price, Baltimore Sun, 21 Feb. 2024

Noa is left for dead, and whatever friends and loved ones who have survived are led away, to be used as slave labor for …something. —David Fear, Rolling Stone, 8 May 2024

Here, Hondo begins a large-scale recapitulation, in a handful of scenes, of the grimly infuriating history of French colonialism from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, and of a reliance on slave labor that lasted in the Caribbean colonies until the mid-nineteenth century. —Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 20 Mar. 2024

Paul Trible himself owns an antebellum plantation in Kilmarnock, Virginia, called Gascony, which was operated by slave labor in the 18th and 19th centuries. —Brandi Kellam, ProPublica, 22 Dec. 2023

But Western business is choosing not to invest for a myriad of reasons including China’s use of slave labor and the absence of the rule of law. —James Rogan, Washington Examiner, 15 Jan. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1802, in the meaning defined at sense 1