Wage labour (also wage labor in American English) is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labour power under a formal or informal employment contract.
These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages or salaries are market-determined.
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.
These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages or salaries are market-determined.
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.
Characteristics
In modern mixed economies such as those of the OECD
countries, it is currently the most common form of work arrangement.
Although most labour is organised as per this structure, the wage work
arrangements of CEOs, professional employees, and professional contract workers are sometimes conflated with class assignments, so that "wage labour" is considered to apply only to unskilled, semi-skilled or manual labour.
Types
The most
common form of wage labour currently is ordinary direct, or "full-time".
This is employment in which a free worker sells their labour for an
indeterminate time (from a few years to the entire career of the
worker), in return for a money-wage or salary and a continuing
relationship with the employer which it does not in general offer
contractors or other irregular staff. However, wage labour takes many
other forms, and explicit as opposed to implicit (i.e. conditioned by
local labour and tax law) contracts are not uncommon. Economic history
shows a great variety of ways, in which labour is traded and exchanged.
The differences show up in the form of:
- 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.
- Civil (legal) status – the worker could for example be a free citizen, an indentured labourer, the subject of forced labour (including some prison or army labour); a worker could be assigned by the political authorities to a task, they could be a semi-slave or a serf bound to the land who is hired out part of the time. So the labour might be performed on a more or less voluntary basis, or on a more or less involuntary basis, in which there are many gradations.
- Method of payment (remuneration or compensation) – The work done could be paid "in cash" (a money-wage) or "in kind" (through receiving goods and/or services), or in the form of "piece rates" where the wage is directly dependent on how much the worker produces. In some cases, the worker might be paid in the form of credit used to buy goods and services, or in the form of stock options or shares in an enterprise.
- 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.
Criticisms
Wage labour has long been compared to slavery by socialists. As a result, the term "wage slavery" is often utilised as a pejorative for wage labour.
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," and proceeded to argue that wage slavery was actually worse than chattel slavery. 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]".
The
slave, together with his labour-power, was sold to his owner once for
all.... The [wage] labourer, on the other hand, sells his very self, and
that by fractions.... He [belongs] to the capitalist class; and it is
for him ... to find a buyer in this capitalist class.
—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." Both the Milgram and Stanford experiments have been found useful in the psychological study of wage-based workplace relations. 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. 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.
For Marxists, labour-as-commodity, which is how they regard wage labour, provides a fundamental point of attack against capitalism.
"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."
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!"
