> Slaves also had next to no protection.
One should not base their notion of slavery on popular culture like Game of Thrones or Gladiator but on reading historic books. Or Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome
> Although in general freed slaves could become citizens, with the right to vote if they were male
> Roman slaves could hold property which, despite the fact that it belonged to their masters, they were allowed to use as if it were their own.
> Claudius announced that if a slave was abandoned by his master, he became free. Nero granted slaves the right to complain against their masters in a court. And under Antoninus Pius, a master who killed a slave without just cause could be tried for homicide.[65] Legal protection of slaves continued to grow as the empire expanded. It became common throughout the mid to late 2nd century AD to allow slaves to complain of cruel or unfair treatment by their owners.
Also some slave had been administering largest empires on Earth (China, Roman Empire) or establishing empires of their own with control over lifes of milions of free people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamluk
> Particularly in Egypt, but also in the Levant, Mesopotamia, and India, mamluks held political and military power. In some cases, they attained the rank of sultan, while in others they held regional power as emirs or beys. Most notably, mamluk factions seized the sultanate centered on Egypt and Syria, and controlled it as the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517).
So back to the subject. Slavery and serfdom had been complex institutions spanning thousands of years and multiple cultures and historical circumstances.
And yes. I am personally convinced that bringing poor people and immigrants with limited citizenship rights into perpetuating economic relation where they cannot make economic progress and mostly accumulate debt and obligations with limited social benefits is modern version of serfdom.