My eyes popped out a bit when I read this article:
The prime minister’s facing pressure to improve monitoring on the treatment of workers owned by Canadian investors there.
Owned by Canadian investors there. Owned.
I don’t know how to break it to the writers and editors at the Globe, but investors don’t own workers. Lords and barons don’t have villeins working their fields anymore, and don’t collect inheritence taxes from peasant children when their parents die (look it up). Workers should be free to choose between employers, and to refuse such things as needlessly dangerous work without fear of being killed. Workers should be allowed to organize, if they want, to bargain for better compensation and conditions, without fear of being killed. We don’t fucking own workers anymore.
‘Owned workers’ has already started to happen in the US. Saw it a few years ago on Michael Moore’s “Capitalism, A Love Story”. Look up “Dead Peasants” insurance.
It was a simple a Freudian slip – a kind of wish fulfillment on the part of the rightwing fanatics who long for the days of yore when those who laboured were no more than chattel; animals whose sole function was to increase the wealth and comfort of their betters; beasts of burden whose lives were worthless except to the degree that they could produce value surplus to their basic needs – the surplus being taken from them to enrich the lives of others. The labouring class once woke up from this nightmare in the West but are gradually being dragged back into slavery.