Today's Slavery

I'm taking an online course in Catholic Social Teaching and left this response to a classmate's post:

Thanks for your point about the reductive power of poverty. That poverty forcefully reduces people's identities to the struggle for survival, which is largely bound up with one's employment, is heartbreaking. I can't fathom an existence wherein I live hand to mouth, from one paycheck to the next, without any time for reading or guitar or long conversations over beer or coffee.

This gets at a more insidious consequence of low-wage life than being unable to make rent, awful as that is. Poverty does not merely steal livelihoods; it steals life. It reduces human beings to human workings. "Slaves" may be the more appropriate term, for slaves are those who belong to another, whose very bodies are not their own. What else are low-wage workers? We thought we put slavery behind us with the Civil War, but all we've really done is smeared lipstick across its face and dressed it up to look appropriate for our more "enlightened" times.