Tell that to the sharecroppers and the sheriff's chain gang. They'll die laughing.
Somehow at the end of the war, free labor wound up in a state awfully reminiscent of indentured labor a century earlier. No haggling, no negotating power, no leverage, no nothing. Just the time-card, the black-list, and the Company Store.
You sound like a union organizer.
Maybe it hasn't occurred to you, but the difference between the chain gang and the sharecropper and the slave is that the chain gang convict has been convicted by a jury of his peers and his children aren't going to be born into the chain gang and die on the chain gang. Likewise with the sharecropper, with the additional fact that he always has the option of leaving, something that they did in their hundreds of thousands for better jobs...wait for it...in the north.