The pirates’ view of slaves has been debated before and the answer is probably as usual, that it differed from person to person and time to time. We know that some ships had free Africans among their crew and we also know that some pirates had slaves when they settled down / retired at land. But what about slaves in the crew?
Do we know if any commercial ships had slave crews? My thought goes like this: if the commercial ships didn’t have slaves, the pirates probably didn’t either. Perhaps it was a too big risk to use slaves for such jobs?
Sailors weren’t paid very much anyway, but still had some sort of motivation of the payment. And pirate ships easily found new recruits.