How about some more details? Name of the company, town, location ? Is there any written history on this place?
I didn’t name it because I was writing of things that were fairly common in Southern mill towns a hundred or so years ago. This company happens to be still operating and nothing like that has gone on recently as far as I know.
This hit song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joo90ZWrUkU was based on that kind of thing, the lyrics refer to coal mining but the textile mills of the old days as well as other industries operated in a similar fashion. There are some interesting comments concerning the practice. It was not slavery but in some ways may have been worse because the employers did not have any investment in the workers unlike the old time slave owner who had money tied up so that it was in his interest to have his slave stay in good health. Under the later system millworkers were of no consequence, when one died another was easily found. It was the industrial version of the sharecropping system. “De ducks” ate up everything a person earned and left him in debt for life. Any increase in pay was immediately offset by an equal or greater percentage increase in prices at the company store to which he “owed his soul.”