Today I decided to be depressing. The following is not an update. Content warning for:
Slavery
Forced labor
Political violence
Slavery
And slavery
Unfree Labor In Victoria
Overview
The Northern Confederation of Victoria prides itself on being a populist democracy, where matters of policy are carried out by referendum. The various states of the Confederation are held to be largely self-governing, with the Governor of Maine, in the grand tradition of Governor William Kraft, simply being the first among equals. They further hold a national legend of being an enlightened, Christian nation, reaching out to their fellow Americans with the hand of charity and guidance, in the chaotic world of the Collapse.
All of this, of course, is known to be false. Victoria is a brutal, unitary dictatorship. Referenda are means of legitimizing the dictates of the central government, and their true results are only published if they happen to align with that government's views. The states have long been dissolved into purely administrative divisions whose governments served at the pleasure of the Maine Governor -- or, as the office is known to the wider world, the Premier. And to other Americans, Victorians are a roving nightmare, a land of christo-fascists who come with smiles and worthless words of advice, to be replaced by one of the terrifying Victorian Army divisions should one's surroundings grow too prosperous.
It seems almost excessive, then, that Victoria should also be the slavery capital of the world, but so it is.
Despite the image they portray to the world as a paradise of freedom, Victoria is in fact positively brimming with slavery and other forms of unfree labor. By some estimates, no more than 10% of the population can be said to be meaningfully free. It is a country fundamentally built on the backs of people who, to one extent or another, do not own their own autonomy. From their, "volunteer labor drives," to the vast sharecropping operations of the Council of Responsible Negroes, to the infamous slave resorts,
certainly a vast majority of Victoria's populace will inevitably feel the sting of forced labor at multiple points in their lives.
This essay will examine the various forms of unfree labor practiced in Victoria, attempting to classify them by manner of coercion. It will also cover some of the more notable specific instances of Victoria's use of forced labor, and Victoria's role in the international human trafficking market.
Corvée Labor
Most people do not think of the average Victorian citizen as being subject to unfree labor, but the Victorian system very much demands exactly that.
Victoria holds as a matter of ideology that the vast majority of people should work in farming jobs. During the height of the collapse, an estimated quarter of the population died as the government forced its citizenry out of the cities and onto farms, leaving only relatively tiny communities in the great cities along the coast. The result is that an overwhelming majority of the populace works in subsistence farming, with little independent capital or job skills outside of that trade. However, Victoria retains a (semi-)modern state's need for organized labor.
To maintain the fiction that they are a free society, Victoria does not call for labor drafts. Instead, pastors at state-approved churches will announce projects that need doing -- with, of course, the kind supervision of the Christian Marine Corps's Inquisitors branch -- and call for volunteers. Of course, they cannot promise
pay for this work, but volunteers are guaranteed generous rations, and God smiles on the charitable.
Volunteers are plentiful, and where they fall short...well, the Inquisitors have ways of pressuring a population.
Thus, while Victoria does not have a formal system of corvée labor, in actuality, the practice is quite common. These drafts slash across the population broadly, and affect all of the lower strata of society. Men are impressed into labor, forcing women to take up abandoned work in the fields -- work that must be done to cover the punishing, "donation drives," again run through state churches. Refusal to engage with the system is widely-known to result in the usual consequences of going against the grain, and the promise of food is one not to be missed...even if the lost pay might hurt a family more in the long run.
Penal Labor
As with all authoritarian regimes, Victoria has political prisoners aplenty. With Victoria's economy, largely founded on resource extraction, the use for these prisoners was obvious. Victoria often sentences not just political prisoners -- who rarely have the opportunity to finish their sentences -- but also a variety of other criminals to work in mining facilities, or other dangerous, low-skill labor. The redemptive power of labor -- so the line goes -- purifies the soul and makes these convicts fit for society once more.
In practice, people sentenced to this work are worked with the absolute minimum of safety regulations, in the worst work Victoria needs performed. It is one way in which the worst of the regime's excesses are kept from the population at large -- after all, one's life may be hard, but there is
certainly worse, if you stoop to criminality.
Serfdom
The Council of Responsible Negroes (CORN) is, officially, a social reform initiative headed by Gunnery Sergeant Matthews, the only black CMC Inquisitor and a personal acquaintance of Rumford. CORN's mission is to, "Reform the Negro race through the redemptive power of labor, supervised by their white brethren, and someday elevate them to the status of being responsible members of society." In reality, it is Matthews's personal fiefdom -- his way of cashing out of his service in the CMC before the rolling wave of purges reached him. Matthews presented to Rumford himself a proposal to force the entire black population of Victoria into sharecropping for white landlords, with Matthews and a council selected by him responsible for administering to this population. Rumford accepted, and so was CORN born.
Laborers under CORN's auspices are formally recognized by most nations outside of the Russosphere as existing in a form of serfdom. Plots of land are, "rented," to family units, which are required by the terms of their, "lease," to maintain that land. They are subject to the unique CORN legal system, where all crimes are addressed by a six-day justice cycle, with all offenses punishable by hanging. Most commonly, courts are convened, conducted, and their sentences executed on the spot of the arrest, trial judges and juries being held as unnecessary in this case. Black laborers have no rights to their harvests beyond what their landlord chooses to leave them as a matter of general policy. Generally, this is just barely enough to survive, but frequently, landlords' ignorance of conditions on their land (they are, overwhelmingly, absentee, leaving daily administration to CORN) leads them to leave too little. This commonly results in riots -- dealt with by CORN Enforcers, possibly with CMC backup, in the usual manner.
There is no exit path for CORN citizens; their place in society is ordained by law, and they have no legal course of redress for their condition, or offenses committed against them. Their only security is in obscurity, fortune, and -- if they know the right people -- an attempted escape.
Non-black citizens of Victoria sometimes find themselves in similar circumstances, but the path to those circumstances, for them, originates through the accumulation of unmanageable debt -- explained below.
Debt Bondage
The average citizen of Victoria is deliberately held destitute. Subsistence farming is the nature of life in the destitute nation. With much food taken in the form of, "donation drives," organized by local churches (to be used by social elites or exported elsewhere for profit), local food shortages are frequent, requiring the people growing the food to purchase enough to feed their families. Between that and the constant need to procure tools and household necessities in an economy where the organized mass production of either is deliberately limited to just enough to supply the state, households often find themselves unable to support themselves. With community bonds strongly discouraged by the CMC -- after all, communities trading favors instead of participating in the market could slide into
communism -- many citizens often find themselves forced to turn to the social elite for aid.
There is a distinct class of Victorian elite that makes its living by loaning money to the lower classes, filling this demand. They live on the interest payments. Of course, these interest payments often spiral out of control, a phenomenon at the intersection of hostile neglect and
design. For a family so destitute that even another debt cannot rescue them from their financial ruin, options are bleak -- and entirely outside their control.
A creditor whose debtors have gone bankrupt has access to a few legal forms of recourse. They can annul the debt, out of a spirit of charity. This, of course, happens so rarely as to be more in the realm of myth than of actual fact. A creditor can opt to repossess the debtors' assets until the debt is paid. This will leave the family completely bereft of anything, and they often find themselves bound to their victimizer in a sharecropping agreement not unlike what the citizens of CORN endure as a matter of fact. Finally, a creditor can demand the unpaid services of one of the family until the debt is paid -- a term that often ends up being for life. Victorian laws requiring debt bondage are infamously creditor-friendly, and the rate at which service pays a debt is appalling even by the standards of debt bondage.
The only choices families who reach this point have is in how to react once the choice is imposed. If their possessions are seized, they can enter their creditor's service, or not --
if the creditor does not simply evict them, in which case they must desperately seek other options before they starve. If debt bondage is demanded, their only choice -- insofar as the creditor leaves that choice to them -- is who to send. Rarely, families may make the decision to send a member into debt bondage before the debt grows so great as to be a life sentence.
Once somebody is pressed into debt bondage, they are, for the duration of their term, functionally property of their creditor until such time as they serve their term, or their creditor releases them. There are virtually no legal protections for debt laborers, save that killing them remains murder, should law enforcement take an interest in the case. The protection is often, functionally, absent. Furthermore, debt contracts are transferrable, meaning that a citizen bound in Stephenville, Newfoundland, may end their term -- if, indeed, it ever ends -- in Boston, Massachusetts, with no assets or any connections willing to help them reach home. The best case scenario for a debt laborer is a kind creditor who does not ask too much and releases them back to their homes. This is rare, as that sort of person is not typically the sort to demand debt bondage, or get into the debt business. The worst case is death or eternal service.
However, there is one option that takes debt laborers out of the system of debt bondage. However, it does so only to place them in a far worse position still. While laborers are meant to be released at the end of their term, there is a provision in Victorian law that permits them to be sold for an indefinite term to a very specific set of parties. Many creditors make a handsome living by forcing families into bondage, acquiring the services of attractive or otherwise striking members of the family, and selling them to the most infamous and internationally-visible form of Victorian unfree labor: the slave resorts.
Chattel Slavery
Victoria's luxury resorts are renowned internationally -- the only industry in which the backward nation can compete with the rest of the world in the open market.
Victoria hosts many foreign-owned resorts in what once was the nation's inheritance of state and national parks from the United States and Canada. These resorts cater to the international elite, not just within the Russosphere. The accommodations are luxurious. The vistas are spectacular. The staff are endlessly helpful, friendly, and eager to please, and the service is accordingly fantastic. They are renowned as a place to enjoy unfettered luxury for as long as one desires.
Barring the management and select overseers, every single employee there is a slave.
Victoria specializes in supplying labor to the groups running these resorts. Individuals supplied are sold outright to the development groups, and from that point on are legally considered property of those resorts. Labor conditions vary by company, but make no mistake -- the individuals thusly purchased are subject to chattel slavery. They are property with neither rights nor protections. This is the foundation of the competitiveness of the Victorian service industry. The labor is free, and rigorously instructed to obey all requests from guests instantly, eagerly, and to the letter. This means, to be absolutely clear:
any request at all. Victorian resorts market to the wealthy who wish to experience the life of a noble, waited on hand and foot by servants who would not even conceive of saying no.
The conditions of slaves on Victorian resorts obviously vary wildly. Some are paid the bare minimum of care needed to keep them going. Some are kept in good condition to ensure good service and more mental resilience, allowing them to be worked longer before a breakdown. Some are guarded jealously by their owners; some are freely sold to guests who take a liking to them. It depends on the policies of the companies that own them. None of them, however, can ever expect to be free.
Victoria's benefit in all of this is tax revenues, along with the development groups' generous contributions to the bribe economy that thrives in Victoria's bureaucracy. In addition, Victoria actually operates one state-owned resort of its own, to more directly benefit from the labor conditions of their market.
Cape Cod Bay Luxury Resort
In the 2060s, after decades of hosting foreign corporations benefitting by Victoria's...employer-friendly...employee practices, a group of bureaucrats in the State of Massachusetts grew restless from watching foreigners benefit from the conditions Victoria established for them, and decided to work together to get a cut of their own. Using their positions, they began putting pressure on various resorts owning land on the choice location of Cape Cod Bay, jacking up regulations -- and profiting handsomely by bribes offered to evade the regulations. Using this income -- and variously coercive means -- the cabal bought out what private land remained on the Bay. Once they had amassed sufficient resources, they stopped accepting bribes, destroying the resorts' profit margins and forcing the corporations to pull out. The cabal bought up the land, and started laying the groundwork for a massive resort encompassing the entire bay -- the best territory in the entire nation for such a project.
And at
this point, the scale of the malfeasance clear, the various corporations complained to the Victorian government. They threatened to shutter all the resorts they operated, and the Inquisitors came down on the cabal like a sack of bricks. The entire cabal was purged, sentenced to forced labor for the rest of their lives, and dissolved. The Victorian government made profuse apologies to the corporations affected and tendered financial compensation.
However, they kept the land.
The Inquisitors executing the purge were fascinated by the content of the plans, and felt like it was a good idea, all told. A resort encompassing the entire Bay would naturally have a vast competitive advantage even before factoring in the good rates it could get on labor acquisition and an Inquisitor-enforced lack of the graft-based inefficiencies plaguing other resorts. They leaned on the Premier not to return the land to its original owners, and instead to transfer the project to the CMC.
Of course, this necessitated further compensation to the corporations involved. If they got the idea that Victoria would nationalize their property at will, they would more than likely take their business -- and the crucial foreign currency it brought in -- elsewhere. Victoria sold off additional land to the corporations, granted them increased privileges in communities adjacent to their resorts to better integrate them into the resort communities, and, crucially, offered them the on-call services of the Inquisitors in the event of other functionaries trying the same thing. Finally, the government signed a pledge with the corporations' host governments that they would never again nationalize land like this.
All of this, however, occurred in the background as the Cape Cod Bay Luxury Resort began to take form. Massive corvée projects remade and integrated the various resorts already there, with the gaps filling in with new facilities. The slaves, acquired in the transition, were also put to work in constructing their new place of employment. The cabal that made the project possible, along with many other labor criminals, had their first work assignments building the resort they had begun. It was a grand national project for Victoria.
It was also the cause of many troubles. So many free laborers recruited through the, "volunteer," labor drives were directly exposed to the truth of Victorian slavery, and the conditions endured by its victims, that it could not be contained. The word of this spreading was one of the primary causes of the unrest of the 2060s. The Inquisitors, chagrined that their greed had compromised their security, clamped down hard, but the damage was done -- even today, Victoria does not command as absolute a hold on its populace as before.
Still, the project was completed, and the resort opened with much pomp and circumstance. Thousands of slaves, smiles permanently fixed to their faces, catered to the needs of the international elite who were either able to hold their noses at the foundation of the enterprise, or actively sought it out.
Today, the Resort is the premier slave resort in Victoria, using its unique advantages to outcompete foreign companies while offering a superior experience. The staff are kept in excellent condition, given quality training for their roles, and screened for striking characteristics. The facilities are extensive, supported by several towns whose lives revolve around participating in the resort experience (under the threat of direct Inquisitorial displeasure, should they act out), and almost unbelievably luxurious. The Resort has hosted business executives, celebrities, and even heads of state.
The Resort today is Victoria's pride and joy -- fabulously profitable, a great way to make highly-placed connections abroad, and a colossal machine of human misery at the behest of the state. Thousands of slaves work there, and thousands more pass through.
All that labor has a source -- and a destination.
Human Trafficking
The Collapse, while at first characterized by the near-total cessation of international trade -- due to heightened tensions, the spread of diseases, the end of global free trade practices, and no small amount of outright piracy as the era of protected free navigation came to an end, among many other factors -- has also led to a flourishing in human trafficking, as trade opens back up again.
Initially, it was nearly impossible to conduct trade of anything but strategic resources with state backing, as turning a profit in the hostile environment of the Collapse was essentially beyond any actor's reach. Only states, with their ability to soak losses in pursuit of long-term gains, were able to invest the resources required to keep any trade running -- and international human trafficking was a low priority indeed, for such actors.
This changed with the entry of the Northern Confederation of Victoria to the scene. Victoria is well-known as an international pariah. While their impact -- in the form of them having been the one to slide the knife into the United States, and kept down any successors at Russia's behest -- has been felt across the world, they seldom act to directly affect the course of world affairs. Infamously -- albeit unsuccessfully -- autarkic, they refuse to engage with any powers outside of the Russosphere in a non-hostile context. The sole exception is their resort industry.
However, Victoria's first entry to the human trafficking market came in the aftermath of the Pacific War. The War was bloody, hard, and complicated to prosecute. It often felt indecisive, and it ended in a negotiated settlement long before Victorian-commanded forces could press the victory home by force. In the aftermath, Victoria was saddled with debts, and its few soldiers involved in the conflict were frustrated, having spent the time relieving themselves by sacking the areas they were tasked with occupying. Victoria needed to get something out of the conflict, as they were looming dangerously close to insolvency. Tsar Alexander had not considered them at all in the treaty. Then, an official close to Rumford recalled the various tales of soldiers taking brides from prisoners of war or from conquered populations, and an idea occurred to him -- one he swiftly relayed to his boss.
Thus it was that Victorian took tens of thousands of women in Pacific Republic territory captive, bringing them back to Victoria before selling them internationally to any buyers who would take them. By then, the conditions preventing trade had abated slightly -- not enough that trade had recovered, but enough that there was a profit to be made on so high-priced a good as a personal slave. The sales went through, and together with more traditional plunder, Victoria had its payout.
Some economists have credited this sale as the signal to the world that started the slow resumption of world trade -- an ongoing process, even today. This has been largely debunked in recent years. Conditions were still too hostile to support a general resumption of trade. However, it did demonstrate to various criminal enterprises that illicit, high-demand goods, and particularly human cargo, were able to turn enough of a profit to be worth the risks.
Victoria largely ignored this flourishing resumption in black market trade. In the early 2050s, they were unconcerned with any participation in the international markets, and had domestic concerns. In particular, as Kraft died and Rumford exited government (by, secretly, dying) in the mid-2050s, the military was fundamentally reformed into an expeditionary force capable of suppressing reforming American polities at need. They were content to profit by skimming off the top from the foreign resorts and their massive power facilities.
That all changed with the events culminating in the foundation of the Cape Cod Bay Luxury Resort. The Resort has a market-warping effect on the flow of human labor within Victoria. The demand is
massive, far larger than any other resort, and the demand drove a shift in how labor was supplied. Debt laborers found their way to the Resort in the usual ways, and corrupt officials could make a tidy sum by remanding promising penal laborers to the Resort, but that was no longer remotely enough. The scale of the project was too much, and supplying it locally risked another 2060s-style backlash. Thus, the Resort's Inquisitorial management turned to another source -- the military, and the Crusader branch of the CMC.
In the tradition set by the Pacific War, Victorian military and Crusader units often took war brides from territory they passed through. It was fairly trivial for the Inquisitors to encourage them to abduct some, "promising," specimens. Well, "some." Many.
Many.
Thousands of slaves flowed to the Resort through these various channels. Over time, foreign buyers from the rebounding international human trafficking market began showing up there as well; there was so much supply, so why not? Eventually, even other resorts started making their purchases at Cape Cod Bay. As demand spiked, the Inquisitors recognized the opportunity to make yet more money still, and they asked the Army to increase acquisitions, even as they hashed out rules for the burgeoning market in the Bay.
Today, thousands of slaves flow to and pass through the Resort every year, only a relative handful ever actually working there. Of those who
do work there, many leave by sale. Unfree staff are sold at premium rates to clients who take an interest. With excellent health, training in hospitality services and likely other skills, and especially screened for desirability, these people are in high demand. They are purchased either very directly as personal slaves, or under the excuse (real or feigned) of a marriage stemming from a whirlwind vacation romance. Scores of slaves depart the country each year this way. To families of Victorian slaves exported in this manner, "Married foreign," is a common euphemism to mask the shame and grief of having lost a family member to this fate, especially in cases where they were forced to sell the family member into bondage to cover debts. The most they can hope for, in these cases, is that their lost child's marriage is -- or becomes -- genuine, and that their new in-law either allows the child to see their family again, or even reaches out to rescue the family from their situation, likely little-improved.
That, of course, happens rarely.
That said, the demand for staff consumes only a fraction of the supply that now flows into the markets ringing the Resort. The Resort's Inquisitors have the right of first refusal, and they exploit it to the hilt, selecting the very, "best," individuals for their acquisitions. They also receive favorable rates -- the perks of being the secret police. After slaves pass through that refusal, they go to open market -- to domestic or foreign private buyers, to other Victorian resorts, or -- increasingly, in the majority -- to international human traffickers.
Quite by accident, to fuel their Resort's insatiable demand for human labor, the Inquisitors have founded the world capital for slave trading in Cape Cod Bay, and they skim a hosting sum off of every transaction conducted in their vast markets -- just another dram of profit eked from the horrifyingly vast machine for the production of human misery that is the Northern Confederation of Victoria.
Conclusion
Victoria's use of unfree labor is widely known, but the
extent of it is, ironically, masked by the sheer severity of the worst of it. Thousands are victimized by the Inquisitors' slave markets every year, but
tens of millions are held in some form of bondage with regularity. As expected, the Victorian system is one founded upon a vast bedrock of human suffering, but the sheer scale of it is difficult to grasp for most outsiders. The subversive, in Victoria, have a habit of saying that nobody there is free. If one counts various forms of unfree labor as the definition of not being free, then that is not
quite true -- but, nevertheless, it paints a picture of a nation where nine of every ten people, and more foreigners besides, will, at some point in their lives, be subject to the loss of their personal autonomy -- at the hands of the state, or of their fellow citizens.
It turns out that Victoria can indeed be machine-like -- if that machine is built for the mass production of oppression and misery.
what is a as poptart put it a meaningful sacrifices on our part?
by GM yeah I can see how making amends at the expense of our non-indigenous citizenry could be bad
but the US does like its trickle-down economics 
add it to the pile 
