Definitions. . The 1926 Slavery Convention described slavery as "...the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised..." Therefore, slaves cannot leave an owner or employer without explicit permission, and they will be returned if they escape. Therefore a system of slavery — as opposed to the isolated instances found in any society — requires official, legal recognition of ownership, or widespread tacit arrangements with local authorities, by masters who have some influence because of their social and/or economic status.. . The word slave comes from the Latin term sclavus, which is thought to have originally referred to slavs, people from Eastern Europe, including parts of the Byzantine empire. The current usage of the word serfdom is not usually synonymous with slavery, because serfs are considered to have had some rights. In the strictest sense of the word, "slaves" are people who are not only owned, but who have no rights and are also not paid.. . The International Labour Organization defines "forced labour" as "all work or service which is extracted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily", albeit with certain exceptions: military service, convicts, emergencies and minor community services. [1]. The ILO asserts that child labour amounts to forced labour in which the child's work is exacted from the family as a whole.. . In some historical contexts, compulsory labour to repay debts by adults has been regarded as slavery, depending upon the rights held by such individuals.. . Mandatory military service in liberal democracies is a controversial subject: one view is that conscripts are not "slaves", as they have substantial legal rights, and any government which took it upon itself to implement conscription, outside a time of extreme national emergency, would eventually face a backlash at an election. Another view interprets acceptance of conscription as a sign of chauvinist, ultra-nationalist and/or fascist ideologies, justified by philosophies such as the Hegelian notion of nations having rights which supersede those of individuals.. . In United States legal usage, the term involuntary servitude means a condition of labouring for another without one's willful consent. It does not necessarily mean the complete lack of freedom found in chattel slavery.. . Many left wing thinkers have discussed the idea of "wage slavery", although it is generally accepted that payment of a wage signifies "free labour", with the quite different disadvantages experienced by such workers.. . Ordinary citizens in totalitarian states are not generally considered slaves, as the only real point of comparison is restrictions on movement.. [edit]. . Unfree labour. . Main article: Unfree labour. . Most people subject to the above conditions are covered by the generic term unfree labour, which includes all forms of slavery and similar labour systems. Unfree labour is now the preferred term of many scholars, because of the wide variety of ambiguities that may be attached to words like "slavery". One reason is that references to disparate, heterogenous types of labour have been translated into the English as "slavery".. . The British historian Sir Moses Finley, one of the most distinguished scholars of ancient slavery, suggested that "slavery" was imprecise and that chattel slavery, in which the slave has no legal rights and could be bought and sold, was sufficiently different from other forms of unfree labour, and a greater violation of human rights, to be labeled distinctively.. . Many other slaves were given free land and other things by the American government.. [edit]. . How do people become slaves?. . Historically, slaves were often those humans of a different ethnicity, nationality, religion,