To install click the Add extension button. That's it.


Kelly Slayton
Congratulations on this excellent venture… what a great idea!
Alexander Grigorievskiy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wage labour (also wage labor in American English), usually referred to as paid work, paid employment, or paid labour, refers to the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer in which the worker sells their labour power under a formal or informal employment contract.[1] These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages or salaries are market-determined. [2]

In exchange for the money paid as wages (usual for short-term work-contracts) or salaries (in permanent employment contracts), the work product generally becomes the undifferentiated property of the employer, except for special cases such as the vesting of intellectual property patents in the United States where patent rights are usually vested in the employee personally responsible for the invention. A wage labourer is a person whose primary means of income is from the selling of their labour in this way.





  • Employment status – a worker could be employed full-time, part-time, or on a casual basis. They could be employed for example temporarily for a specific project only, or on a permanent basis. Part-time wage labour could combine with part-time self-employment. The worker could be employed also as an apprentice.
  • Method of hiring – the worker might engage in a labour-contract on their own initiative, or they might hire out their labour as part of a group. But they may also hire out their labour via an intermediary (such as an employment agency) to a third party. In this case, they are paid by the intermediary, but work for a third party which pays the intermediary. In some cases, labour is subcontracted several times, with several intermediaries. Another possibility is that the worker is assigned or posted to a job by a political authority, or that an agency hires out a worker to an enterprise together with means of production.


Wage labour has long been compared to slavery by socialists.[citation needed] As a result, the term "wage slavery" is often utilised as a pejorative for wage labour.[3] Similarly, advocates of slavery looked upon the "comparative evils of Slave Society and of Free Society, of slavery to human Masters and slavery to Capital,"[4] and proceeded to argue that wage slavery was actually worse than chattel slavery.[5] Slavery apologists like George Fitzhugh contended that workers only accepted wage labour with the passage of time, as they became "familiarized and inattentive to the infected social atmosphere they continually inhale[d]".[4]


Karl Marx

According to Noam Chomsky, analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the Enlightenment era. In his 1791 book On the Limits of State Action, classical liberal thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt explained how "whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness" and so when the labourer works under external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is."[7] Both the Milgram and Stanford experiments have been found useful in the psychological study of wage-based workplace relations.[citation needed] Additionally, as per anthropologist David Graeber, the earliest wage labour contracts we know about were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money, and the slave, another, with which to maintain their living expenses.) Such arrangements, according to Graeber, were quite common in New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or Brazil.[8] C. L. R. James argued in The Black Jacobins that most of the techniques of human organisation employed on factory workers during the industrial revolution were first developed on slave plantations.[9]

For Marxists, labour-as-commodity, which is how they regard wage labour,[10] provides a fundamental point of attack against capitalism.[11] "It can be persuasively argued," noted one concerned philosopher, "that the conception of the worker's labour as a commodity confirms Marx's stigmatisation of the wage system of private capitalism as 'wage-slavery;' that is, as an instrument of the capitalist's for reducing the worker's condition to that of a slave, if not below it."[12] That this objection is fundamental follows immediately from Marx's conclusion that wage labour is the very foundation of capitalism: "Without a class dependent on wages, the moment individuals confront each other as free persons, there can be no production of surplus value; without the production of surplus-value there can be no capitalist production, and hence no capital and no capitalist!"[13]

See also


  2. ^ Deakin & Wilkinson 2005
  3. ^ Hallgrimsdottir & Benoit 2007; Roediger 2007a.
  4. ^ a b Fitzhugh 1857, p. xvi.
  5. ^ Carsel 1940.
  6. ^ Marx 1847, Chapter 2.
  7. ^ Chomsky (1993). "Year 501: The Conquest Continues". p. 19].
  8. ^ Graeber 2004, p. 71.
  9. ^ Graeber 2007, p. 106.
  13. ^ Marx 1990, p. 1005. Emphasis in the original.



External links

This page was last edited on 17 June 2021, at 05:51