How have the courts treated a claim for unpaid debts in the context of employment law?

It requires no quantum leap in logic to infer from these established facts that these huge debts would be paid through years of labor under circumstances fairly characterized as involuntary servitude. Certainly, the district judge was permitted to draw such a conclusion from the record. "There comes a point where the court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men." Watts v. Indiana, 338 U.S. 49, 52, 69 S.Ct. 1347, 1349, 93 L.Ed. 1801 (1949) (Frankfurter, J.). Accordingly, the district judge properly considered this sad reality as one aggravating circumstance supporting an upward departure.