Wage slavery

Wage slavery is a term used to criticize what critics see as the exploitation of workers by those who own capital. It can be loosely defined as a situation where one or more people are excessively dependent on wages or salaries, particularly when pay, chances for advancement, job availability, and working conditions are seen as inadequate or poor. Critics of wage-based employment often use the term to highlight two main issues: the exploitation of labor, which they view as an unequal bargaining power between workers and capital owners (especially when wages are very low, as in sweatshops), and social stratification, which they describe as a lack of workers’ self-management, fulfilling job choices, and leisure in the economy. The criticism of social stratification also covers a wider range of employment choices that are constrained by the pressures of a hierarchical society, forcing people into unfulfilling work that strips them of their "species character"—not just under the threat of extreme poverty and starvation, but also due to social stigma and loss of status. Historically, many socialist organizations and activists have proposed workers’ self-management or worker cooperatives as alternatives to wage labor.

The idea that wage labor resembles slavery dates back to ancient times. In Ancient Rome, Cicero noted in *De Officiis* that “the very wage [wage labourers] receive is a pledge of their slavery.” With the Industrial Revolution, thinkers like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx expanded on this comparison between wage labor and slavery, while the Luddites emphasized the dehumanization caused by machines. The introduction of wage labor in 18th-century Britain faced resistance, which helped give rise to the principles of syndicalism and anarchism. Before the American Civil War, defenders of chattel slavery in the Southern United States used the concept of wage slavery to argue that their slaves were better off than Northern workers. After the Civil War, when the U.S. abolished most forms of slavery, labor union activists found the metaphor useful. According to historian Lawrence Glickman, from the 1870s through the 1890s, references to wage slavery were abundant in the labor press, and it was hard to find a speech by a labor leader that did not include the phrase.

In 1763, French journalist Simon Linguet described wage slavery in an influential passage: the slave was valuable to his master because of the money spent on him, and they were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market. He argued that it is the impossibility of living by any other means that forces farm laborers to till soil whose fruits they will not eat, and masons to build buildings in which they will not live. Want compels them to kneel before the rich man to get permission to enrich him, and he questioned what effective gain the suppression of slavery had brought them. They are free, he said, but that is their misfortune, as they have the most terrible and imperious master—need. They must find someone to hire them or die of hunger, and he asked if that is truly freedom.

The view that wage work is similar to chattel slavery was promoted in the late 18th and 19th centuries by both defenders of chattel slavery (especially in the U.S. South) and opponents of capitalism (who also criticized chattel slavery). Some slavery defenders argued that Northern workers were “free but in name—the slaves of endless toil” and that their own slaves were better off. This claim has been partly supported by some modern studies, which suggest that the material conditions of 19th-century slaves were “better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time.” Henry David Thoreau wrote during this period that it is hard to have a Southern overseer, worse to have a Northern one, but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. U.S. abolitionists rejected the analogy as false, arguing that wage workers were “neither wronged nor oppressed.” Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans maintained that wage work was different from slavery as long as laborers had the opportunity to eventually work for themselves and achieve self-employment. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared “now I am my own master” upon taking a paying job, but later concluded that experience shows there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must also be abolished. He spoke about these conditions arising from unequal bargaining power between the ownership class and the laborer class within a compulsory monetary market, noting that no more crafty and effective device for defrauding southern laborers existed than substituting orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages, which had a show of honesty but put the laborer completely at the mercy of the landowner and shopkeeper. Self-employment became less common as the artisan tradition faded in the later 19th century. In 1869, *The New York Times* described the system of wage labor as “a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South.” E. P. Thompson notes that for British workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, there was a gap in status between a “servant,” a hired wage-laborer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan.