peonage
Noun
Meaning
The condition of a peon.
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Phrases with the word
Examples
Indeed, India has become notorious as a country in which a very large part of the working population is laboring in effective debt peonage to a landlord or other creditor.
In contrast to the other Reconstruction Amendments, the Thirteenth Amendment was rarely cited in later case law, but has been used to strike down peonage and some race-based discrimination as "badges and incidents of slavery".
Enforcement of federal civil rights law in the South created numerous peonage cases, which slowly traveled up through the judiciary.
It held that although employers sometimes described their workers' entry into contract as voluntary, the servitude of peonage was always (by definition) involuntary.
The U.S. sought to counter foreign propaganda and increase its credibility on the race issue by combatting the Southern peonage system.
While black workers were not the exclusive victims of peonage arrangements in America, they suffered under its yoke in vastly disproportionate numbers.