[QUOTE=Derleth]
As long as you are in debt to the store, it is obviously illegal to evade your responsibilities by quitting and leaving town. However, as long as you work at company pay you are never going to pay off your debt to the store. /QUOTE]What would stop you from (1) quitting and then paying off the debt by working at another job, (2) declaring bankrupcy and quitting, or a number of other scenerios?
No, it isn’t illegal to quit and leave town. You still owe the debt, but there’s no requirement that you pay it off by working for a particular company. And even if you refuse to pay the debt that’s not illegal and you can’t go to jail unless the company can prove somehow that you defrauded them. Sure, you might never pay off your debt, but nowadays there’s bankruptcy.
[QUOTE=TokyoPlayer]
Back in the Bad Old Days, vagrancy laws were strictly enforced that virtually made it a crime to be homeless and unemployed. If you were a miner working in a company town somewhere in the Appalachians or the Rockies, quitting your job and trying to walk out on your debt might mean a hundred mile hike to the nearest large town, and getting picked up by some local sheriff could mean 3-12 months on a work gang.
Do I have grounds for recovering my $1000?
The term “slave” is not really descriptive. If you agreed to work for someone for some period of time, doing whatever they asked you to, for $1000, most likely the damages would simply consist of you returning the $1000 if you broke the contract. No one can force you to uphold your end of the bargain.
I absolutely agree. The most that can happen to the “slave” is that they have to refund whatever consideration they got from the “master” in return for agreeing to be a slave.
And this is one big difference between nowadays and old-timey-days. It’s not a crime to be in debt, you’re not going to go to prison merely because you have a debt you cannot pay, and your creditor can’t legally kill you or even break your kneecap if you can’t pay. Selling yourself into slavery to pay off your debts isn’t needed, because under any modern legal system you can declare bankruptcy to discharge debts, or just ignore them. And the most that will happen if you ignore a debt is that a court can order seizure of your assets, or future assets or income. But if you’re destitute that isn’t much of a threat, because you have no assets to seize.
The putative master isn’t going to have much luck suing someone so poor that they signed a contract agreeing to be a slave. Never sue poor people, they don’t have any money.
Again, it depends on the law of the particular jurisdiction. The traditional English common law approach was that if a contract was illegal, you couldn’t sue to recover money paid under the contract. For example, gaming debts were not recoverable, since gaming contracts were void. If you owed money on a gaming debt and paid it, you couldn’t then go to the courts to recover it.
In a jurisdiction that uses this rule, no, you couldn’t sue for the $1,000, since a contract for slavery is void, and therefore you shouldn’t have tried to enter into it. If you paid the $1,000 on a contract to purchase a slave, tough noogies (technical legal term 
).
The theory was that by making the contract completely unenforceable, it would discourage people from entering into illegal contracts. Some jurisdictions have changed this rule by statute, to give the courts more leeway to consider the equities of the situation.
We talked about this here: Disposition of ill-gotten gains - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board (sorry I missed the noogies bit).