The power of labor in the United States has been continually eroded for the past several decades, for the unbounded gain of corporations and management. https://rewire.news/article/2016/03/11/anti-union-right-work...
The right to organize has been near lobbied out of existence in many states, and any new attempts are easily busted. At the same time, increased automation, ever narrowing specialization and oversupply of an educated workforce has given employers even more leverage over the labor.
It's not just 'physically horrible'. How many people at google or microsoft have to sell their children to survive? The OP is just so patently ridiculous that the comment isn't even worth taking seriously - but unfortunately, there's Poe's Law...
This was the 1700s. People were living on subsistence farming. If you weren't a landowner in England, you starved, and it wasn't like in 2016 where there's realistic talk of UBI based on automation, I mean it was like over a hundred years before Marx, and long before the industrial revolution.
And it's not like the "wealthy" were so terribly wealthy that they could just take "free" people to America.
And it's also not like the wealthy had nice 1890's first class ship rides.
The times were terrible, and the choices were terrible.
The only thing that has changed between then and now is that you might be able to sue for damages if unsafe conditions on the ship can be shown to have caused your partner's untimely demise.
This is a more reasonable comparison in our modern context where such a contract would be entered into individually, not on behalf of a partner.
Want a house? Be a slave to Microsoft for forty years!
Want to eat? Be a slave to Google!
The poor were more than welcome to stay in England or Germany, it's not like they were kidnapped or anything.
And as far as conditions go, sure, nowadays such trips would be illegal, but how much worse was it than a payed for trip?
Don't forget than if someone died on the trip, the captain lost money.