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Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Sweatshop

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A sweatshop in the United States c.1890

A sweatshop (or sweat factory) is a workplace with very poor, socially unacceptable or illegal working conditions. The work may be difficult, dangerous, climatically challenging or underpaid. Workers in sweatshops may work long hours with low pay, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage; child labor laws may also be violated. The Fair Labor Association's "2006 Annual Public Report" inspected factories for FLA compliance in 18 countries including Bangladesh, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Malaysia, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, China, India, Vietnam, Honduras, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and the US. The U.S. Department of Labor's "2015 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor" found that "18 countries did not meet the International Labour Organization's recommendation for an adequate number of inspectors."

History

A sweatshop in a New York tenement building, c. 1889

19th and early 20th centuries

A sweatshop is a factory or workshop, especially in the clothing industry, where manual workers are employed at very low wages for long hours under poor conditions and many health risks.

Many workplaces through history have been crowded, low-paying and without job security; but the concept of a sweatshop originated between 1830 and 1850 as a specific type of workshop in which a certain type of middleman, the sweater, directed others in garment making (the process of producing clothing) under arduous conditions. The terms sweater for the middleman and sweat system for the process of subcontracting piecework were used in early critiques like Charles Kingsley's Cheap Clothes and Nasty, written in 1850, which described conditions in London, England. The workplaces created for the sweating system (a system of subcontracting in the tailoring trade) were called sweatshops and might contain only a few workers or as many as 300 and more.

Between 1832 and 1850, sweatshops attracted the rural poor to rapidly growing cities, and attracted immigrants to places such as London and New York City's garment district, located near the tenements of New York's Lower East Side. These sweatshops incurred criticism: labor leaders cited them as crowded, poorly ventilated, and prone to fires and rodent infestations: in many cases, there were many workers crowded into small tenement rooms.

In the 1890s, a group calling itself the National Anti-Sweating League was formed in Melbourne and campaigned successfully for a minimum wage via trade boards. A group with the same name campaigned from 1906 in the UK, resulting in the Trade Boards Act 1909.

In 1910, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union was founded to try to improve the condition of these workers.

Criticism of garment sweatshops became a major force behind workplace safety regulation and labor laws. As some journalists strove to change working conditions, the term sweatshop came to refer to a broader set of workplaces whose conditions were considered inferior. In the United States, investigative journalists, known as muckrakers, wrote exposés of business practices, and progressive politicians campaigned for new laws. Notable exposés of sweatshop conditions include Jacob Riis' photo documentary How the Other Half Lives and Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, a fictionalized account of the meat packing industry.

Lewis Hine noted poor working conditions when he photographed workers at the Western Dress Factory in Millville, New Jersey, for the WPA's National Research Project (1937)

In 1911, negative public perceptions of sweatshops were galvanized by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. The pivotal role of this time and place is chronicled at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, part of the Lower East Side Tenement National Historic Site. While trade unions, minimum wage laws, fire safety codes, and labour laws have made sweatshops (in the original sense) rarer in the developed world, they did not eliminate them, and the term is increasingly associated with factories in the developing world.

Late 20th century to present

In a report issued in 1994, the United States Government Accountability Office found that there were still thousands of sweatshops in the United States, using a definition of a sweatshop as any "employer that violates more than one federal or state labor law governing minimum wage and overtime, child labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers' compensation, or industry registration". This recent definition eliminates any historical distinction about the role of a middleman or the items produced, and focuses on the legal standards of developed country workplaces. An area of controversy between supporters of outsourcing production to the Third World and the anti-sweatshop movement is whether such standards can or should be applied to the workplaces of the developing world.

Sweatshops are also sometimes implicated in human trafficking when workers have been tricked into starting work without informed consent, or when workers are kept at work through debt bondage or mental duress, all of which are more likely if the workforce is drawn from children or the uneducated rural poor. Because they often exist in places without effective workplace safety or environmental laws, sweatshops sometimes injure their workers or the environment at greater rates than would be acceptable in developed countries. Sometimes penal labor facilities (employing prisoners) are grouped under the sweatshop label.

Sweatshops conditions resemble prison labor in many cases, especially from a commonly found Western perspective. In 2014 Apple was caught "failing to protect its workers" in one of its Pegatron factories. Overwhelmed workers were caught falling asleep during their 12-hour shifts and an undercover reporter had to work 18 days in a row. Sweatshops in question carry characteristics such as compulsory pregnancy tests for female laborers and terrorization from supervisors into submission. Workers then go into a state of forced labor, if even one day of work is not accounted for, most are immediately fired. These working conditions have been the source of suicidal unrest within factories in the past. Chinese sweatshops known to have increased numbers of suicidal employees have suicide nets covering the whole site, in place to stop over-worked and stressed employees leaping to their deaths.

Use of the term

The phrase sweatshop was coined in 1850, meaning a factory or workshop where workers are treated unfairly, for example having low wages, working long hours, and in poor conditions. Since 1850, immigrants have been flocking to work at sweatshops in cities like London and New York for more than one century. Many of them worked in tiny, stuffy rooms that are prone to fire hazards and rat infestations. The term sweatshop was used in Charles Kingsley's Cheap Clothes and Nasty (1850) describing such workplaces create a ‘sweating system’ of workers. (Blackburn, 1991) The idea of minimum wage and Labour's union was not developed until the 1890s. This issue appears to be solved by some anti-sweatshop organizations. However, the ongoing development of the issue is showing a different situation.

Industries using sweatshop labor

World-famous fashion brands such as H&M, Nike, Adidas and Uniqlo have all been criticized for their use of sweatshops. In 2015, anti-sweatshops protesters marched against the Japanese fast-fashion brand Uniqlo in Hong Kong. Along with the Japanese anti-sweatshops organisation Human Rights Now!, the Hong Kong labour organisation SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour) protested the "harsh and dangerous" working conditions in Uniqlo's value-added factories in China. According to a recent report published by SACOM, Uniqlo’s suppliers were blamed for "systematically underpaying their labour, forcing them to work excessive hours and subjecting them to unsafe working conditions, which included sewage-covered floors, poor ventilation, and sweltering temperatures". According to the 2016 Clean Clothes Campaign, H&M strategic suppliers in Bangladesh were reported for dangerous working environments, which lacked vital equipment for workers and adequate fire exits.

The German sportswear giant Adidas was criticized for its Indonesian sweatshops in 2000, and accused of underpayment, overtime working, physical abuse and child labour. Another sportswear giant, Nike, faced a heavy wave of anti-sweatshop protests, organised by the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and held in Boston, Washington D.C., Bangalore, and San Pedro Sula. They claimed that workers in Nike's contract factory in Vietnam were suffering from wage theft, verbal abuse and harsh working conditions with "temperatures over the legal limit of 90 degrees". Since the 1990s, Nike was reported to employ sweat factories and child labour. Regardless of its effort to turn things around, Nike's image has been affected by the issue during the past two decades. Nike established an independent department which aimed to improve workers’ livelihoods in 1996. It was renamed the Fair Labor Association in 1999, as a non-profit organisation which includes representatives from companies, human rights organizations, and labour unions to work on the monitoring and management of labour rights. To improve its brand image of being immoral, Nike has been publishing annual sustainable business reports since 2001 and annual corporate social responsibility reports continuously since 2005, mentioning its commitments, standards and audits. Similar stories are still heard in the fashion industry in the past decades.

Contributing factors

Fast fashion

A trend called "fast fashion" has contributed to the rise of sweatshops. Fast fashion refers to "rapid reorders and new orders that retailers now exert as they discern sales trends in real time" (Ross, 2015) To catch up with the fast-changing fashion trends to satisfy increasing customers’ demand, these fast-fashion brands have to react and arrange production accordingly. To lower production and the storage cost, they are always searching for cheaper labour which can produce orders in a short period of time. This results in workers suffering from unreasonably long working hours without reasonable payment. A documentary, "The True Cost" (2015), claims that sweatshops relieve pressure on retailers by passing it to factory owners and, ultimately, workers.

Government corruption and inadequate labour protection legislation

Government corruption and inadequate labour protection legislation in developing countries have also contributed to the suffering of their employees. Weak law enforcement has attracted capitalists to invest in these developing countries, which is also a serious problem that leads to arisen of sweatshops. Without reasonable law restrictions, capitalists are able to set up fashion manufacturing plants at a lower cost. According to Zamen (2012), governments in the developing countries often fail to enforce safety standards in local factories because of corruptions and weak law enforcement. These weaknesses allow factories to provide dangerous working conditions for their workers. With reference to the Corruption Perception Index 2016 (2017), those countries with high risk of corruption such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Pakistan and China are reported to have larger numbers of unsafe garments factories operating inside the countries. When Zamen (2012) said “corruption kills”, sweatshops in developing countries would be the prime cases.

In some places, like the UAE, the government or the media does not show the full picture. For example, labour camps in Dubai, UAE do not have proper conditions for the workers and if they protest they can be deported if they are foreigners.

Low education level

It is suggested that these workers should fight back and protect their own labour rights, yet a lot of them in developing countries are ignorant about their own right because of low education level. According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (2016), most of these sweatshops are located in countries that have low education levels. Harrison, A. & Scorse, J. (2004) mentions that most of the workers do not know about their rights, such as matters about wages and supposed working conditions, thus they have no skill set to fight for their labour rights through collective bargain (such as strike or work to rule). Their ignorance makes hard for them to improve working conditions on their own.

Impacts of sweatshops

Child labour

Child labour is one of the most serious impacts that sweatshops have brought. According to the International Labour Office (2013), more than 250 million children are in the employment of which 170 million of them are engaged in textiles and garments industry in developing countries. In hopes of earning a living, many girls in these countries, such as Bangladesh and India, are willing to work at low wages for long working hours, said Sofie Ovaa, an officer of Stop Child Labour (Moulds, 2013). Most fashion manufacturing chains employ low-skilled labour and as child labour are easier to manage and even more suitable than adult labour for certain jobs such as cotton picking, it becomes a particular problem in sweatshops as they are vulnerable with no backups.

Environmental pollution

Not only workers are impacted by sweatshops, but the neighboring environment as well, through lax environmental laws set up in developing countries to help reduce the production cost of the fashion industry. Clothing manufacturing is still one of the most polluting industries in the world. Nevertheless, the environment of developing countries remained deeply polluted by the untreated waste. The Buriganga River in Bangladesh is now black in colour and pronounced biologically dead because neighbouring leather tanneries are discharging more than 150 cubics of liquid waste daily. (Stanko, 2013) The daily life of local people is significantly affected as Buriganga River is their source of bathing, irrigation and transportation. Many workers in the tanneries suffer from serious skin illness since they are exposed to toxic chemicals for long period of time. Air is being highly polluted in such area because the factories do not install proper ventilation facilities. Sweatshops is also an environmental issue as it is not only causing harm to the human right of labour but also their living environment.

Anti-sweatshop movement

History

19th and early 20th centuries

Some of the earliest sweatshop critics were found in the 19th century abolitionist movement that had originally coalesced in opposition to chattel slavery, and many abolitionists saw similarities between slavery and sweatshop work. As slavery was successively outlawed in industrial countries between 1794 (in France) and 1865 (in the United States), some abolitionists sought to broaden the anti-slavery consensus to include other forms of harsh labor, including sweatshops. As it happened, the first significant law to address sweatshops (the Factory Act of 1833) was passed in the United Kingdom several years after the slave trade (1807) and ownership of slaves (1833) were made illegal.

Ultimately, the abolitionist movement split apart. Some advocates focused on working conditions and found common cause with trade unions and Marxists and socialist political groups, or progressive movement and the muckrakers. Others focused on the continued slave trade and involuntary servitude in the colonial world. For those groups that remained focused on slavery, sweatshops became one of the primary objects of controversy. Workplaces across multiple sectors of the economy were categorized as sweatshops. However, there were fundamental philosophical disagreements about what constituted slavery. Unable to agree on the status of sweatshops, the abolitionists working with the League of Nations and the United Nations ultimately backed away from efforts to define slavery, and focused instead on a common precursor of slavery – human trafficking.

Those focused on working conditions included Friedrich Engels, whose book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 would inspire the Marxist movement named for his collaborator, Karl Marx. In the United Kingdom the first effective Factory Act was introduced in 1833 to help improve the condition of workers by limiting work hours and the use of child labor; but this applied only to textile factories. Later Acts extended protection to factories in other industries, but not until 1867 was there any similar protection for employees in small workshops, and not until 1891 was it possible to effectively enforce the legislation where the workplace was a dwelling (as was often the case for sweatshops). The formation of the International Labour Organization in 1919 under the League of Nations and then the United Nations sought to address the plight of workers the world over. Concern over working conditions as described by muckraker journalists during the Progressive Era in the United States saw the passage of new workers rights laws and ultimately resulted in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, passed during the New Deal.

Late 20th century to present

On February 4, 1997 Mayor Ed Boyle of North Olmsted, in the U.S. state of Ohio, introduced the first piece of legislation prohibiting the government of purchasing, renting, or taking on consignment any and all goods made under sweatshop conditions and including in the definition those goods made by political prisoners and incarcerated criminals. Similar legislation was subsequently passed in other American cities such as Detroit, New York, and San Francisco. Later Mayor Boyle introduced the legislation to the Mayors and Managers Association where it was immediately endorsed, and he was invited by President Bill Clinton to address a panel studying the subject in Washington, DC.

Clothing and footwear factories overseas have progressively improved working conditions because the high demand of anti-sweatshop movement, labour right advocates. Sweatshops overseas have been receiving enormous amounts of pressure. Around the working conditions from college students, and other opponents of sweatshops which has led to some of the powerful companies like Nike and the Gap who have agreed to cut back on child labour, restrict the use of dangerous and poisonous chemicals, and drop the average rate of employees working 80-hour weeks, according to groups that monitor such factories. Labour advocates say, this could be a major turning point after 4 decades of workers in Asia and Latin American factories being under paid, under appreciated and working in an unsafe environment.

Recently, there have been strides to eradicate sweatshops through government action, for example by increasing the minimum wage. In China, a developing country that is known to be a hub for sweatshops due to relaxed labor laws, high population and low minimum wage, the minimum wage is set to be raised by approximately 7% in 10 provinces by the end of 2018. As well as this governments are also enforcing stricter labor laws such as in 2013 after the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, a large 5 storied sweatshops that killed 1135 people due to the building not being up to code, Bangladeshi police shut down many other factories after safety checks were completed and not met. However, no action has been as beneficial to the anti-sweatshop movement as that of the rise of social media. Social media has allowed for the world to see exactly what companies are doing and how they are doing it instantaneously, for free and is distributed to a wide audience. The platforms have allowed for viral videos, hundreds of thousands of retweets of quote's or statistic's, millions of liked and shared pictures etc. to be spread to consumers in regards to companies production methods without any censorship and thus forces brands to be more transparent and ethical with their production practices. This is because a brand's reputation can be completely destroyed by a bystander with a smartphone who records a brand's product being made in a sweatshop where its workers are treated inhumanely.

However, social media isn’t just helping to expose brands who are using sweatshops and unethical production practices but also is allowing for companies that are trying to increase awareness of the anti-sweatshop movement to spread their message quickly and efficiently. For example, in May 2017 Mama Cash and The Clean Clothes Campaign, both organizations that are working towards abolishing sweatshops as well as creating a world of sustainable and ethical apparel practices, worked together to create The Women Power Fashion Pop-up. The event took place in Amsterdam and allowed consumers to sit in a room designed to look and feel like a sweatshop and were forced to create 100 ties in an hour which is synonymous to that of the expectations of women working in sweatshops today. This pop-up allowed consumers to actually experience the life of a sweatshop worker for a limited time period and thus made them more sympathetic to the cause. Outside of the pop-up was a petition that consumers could sign in order to convince brands to be more transparent with their clothing manufacturing processes. The campaign went viral and created a significant buzz for the anti-sweatshop movement as well as the work of Mama Cash and The Clean Clothes Campaign.

Anti-sweatshop organizations

In Asia

Sweatshop-free

Sweatshop-free is a term the fashion brand American Apparel created to mean coercion-free, fair-compensation for garment workers who make their products. American Apparel claims its employees earn on average double the federal minimum wage. They receive a number of employee benefits, from health insurance to subsidized transportation and meals, and have access to an onsite medical clinic. It has been heavily featured in the company's advertisements for nearly a decade and has become a common term in the garment industry.

Debate over the effects of globalization and sweatshops

Criticisms

Members of United Students Against Sweatshops marching in protest

More recently, the anti-globalization movement has arisen in opposition to corporate globalization, the process by which multinational corporations move their operations overseas to lower costs and increase profits. The anti-sweatshop movement has much in common with the anti-globalization movement. Both consider sweatshops harmful, and both have accused many companies (such as the Walt Disney Company, The Gap, and Nike) of using sweatshops. Some in these movements charge that neoliberal globalization is similar to the sweating system, arguing that there tends to be a "race to the bottom" as multinationals leap from one low-wage country to another searching for lower production costs, in the same way that sweaters would have steered production to the lowest cost sub-contractor.

Various groups support or embody the anti-sweatshop movement today. The National Labor Committee brought sweatshops into the mainstream media in the 1990s when it exposed the use of sweatshop and child labor to sew clothing for Kathie Lee Gifford's Wal-Mart label. United Students Against Sweatshops is active on college campuses. The International Labor Rights Fund filed a lawsuit on behalf of workers in China, Nicaragua, Swaziland, Indonesia, and Bangladesh against Wal-Mart charging the company with knowingly developing purchasing policies particularly relating to price and delivery time that are impossible to meet while following the Wal-Mart code of conduct. Labor unions, such as the AFL-CIO, have helped support the anti-sweatshop movement out of concern both for the welfare of workers in the developing world and those in the United States.

Social critics complain that sweatshop workers often do not earn enough money to buy the products that they make, even though such items are often commonplace goods such as T-shirts, shoes, and toys. In 2003, Honduran garment factory workers were paid US$0.24 for each $50 Sean John sweatshirt, $0.15 for each long-sleeved T-shirt, and only five cents for each short-sleeved shirt – less than one-half of one percent of the retail price. Even comparing international costs of living, the $0.15 that a Honduran worker earned for the long-sleeved T-shirt was equal in purchasing power to $0.50 in the United States. In countries where labor costs are low, bras that cost US$5–7 apiece retail for US$50 or more in American stores. As of 2006, female garment workers in India earned about US$2.20 per day.

Anti-globalization proponents cite high savings, increased capital investment in developing nations, diversification of their exports and their status as trade ports as the reason for their economic success rather than sweatshops and cite the numerous cases in the East Asian "Tiger Economies" where sweatshops have reduced living standards and wages. They believe that better-paying jobs, increased capital investment and domestic ownership of resources will improve the economies of sub-Saharan Africa rather than sweatshops. They point to good labor standards developing strong manufacturing export sectors in wealthier sub-Saharan countries such as Mauritius.

Anti-globalization organizations argue that the minor gains made by employees of some of these institutions are outweighed by the negative costs such as lowered wages to increase profit margins and that the institutions pay less than the daily expenses of their workers. They also point to the fact that sometimes local jobs offered higher wages before trade liberalization provided tax incentives to allow sweatshops to replace former local unionized jobs. They further contend that sweatshop jobs are not necessarily inevitable. Éric Toussaint claims that quality of life in developing countries was actually higher between 1945 and 1980 before the international debt crisis of 1982 harmed economies in developing countries causing them to turn to IMF and World Bank-organized "structural adjustments" and that unionized jobs pay more than sweatshop ones overall – "several studies of workers producing for US firms in Mexico are instructive: workers at the Aluminum Company of America's Ciudad Acuna plant earn between $21.44 and $24.60 per week, but a weekly basket of basic food items costs $26.87. Mexican GM workers earn enough to buy a pound of apples in 30 minutes of work, while GM workers in the US earn as much in 5 minutes." People critical of sweatshops believe that "free trade agreements" do not truly promote free trade at all but instead seek to protect multinational corporations from competition by local industries (which are sometimes unionized). They believe free trade should only involve reducing tariffs and barriers to entry and that multinational businesses should operate within the laws in the countries they want to do business in rather than seeking immunity from obeying local environmental and labor laws. They believe these conditions are what give rise to sweatshops rather than natural industrialization or economic progression.

In some countries, such as China, it is not uncommon for these institutions to withhold workers' pay.

According to labor organizations in Hong Kong, up to $365 million is withheld by managers who restrict pay in exchange for some service, or don't pay at all.

Furthermore, anti-globalization proponents argue that those in the West who defend sweatshops show double standards by complaining about sweatshop labor conditions in countries considered enemies or hostile by Western governments, while still gladly consuming their exports but complaining about the quality. They contend that multinational jobs should be expected to operate according to international labor and environmental laws and minimum wage standards like businesses in the West do.

Labor historian Erik Loomis claims that the conditions faced by workers in the United States in the Gilded Age have been replicated in developing countries where Western corporations utilize sweatshop labor. In particular, he compares the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 New York to the collapse of Rana Plaza in 2013 Bangladesh. He argues that the former galvanized the population to political activism that eventually pushed through reforms not only pertaining to workplace safety, but also the minimum wage, the eight-hour day, workers' compensation, Social Security the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. American corporations responded by shifting production to developing nations where such protections did not exist. Loomis elaborates:

So in 2013, when over 1100 workers die at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, it is the same industry as the Triangle Fire, with the same subcontracted system of production that allows apparel companies to avoid responsibility for work as the Triangle Fire, and with the same workforce of young and poor women, the same type of cruel bosses, and the same terrible workplace safety standards as the Triangle Fire. The difference is that most of us can't even find Bangladesh on a map, not to mention know enough about it to express the type of outrage our ancestors did after Triangle. This separation of production from consumption is an intentional move by corporations precisely to avoid being held responsible by consumers for their actions. And it is very effective.

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In 1997, economist Jeffrey Sachs said, "My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops, but that there are too few." Sachs and other proponents of free trade and the global movement of capital cite the economic theory of comparative advantage, which states that international trade will, in the long run, make all parties better off. The theory holds that developing countries improve their condition by doing something that they do "better" than industrialized nations (in this case, they charge less but do the same work). Developed countries will also be better off because their workers can shift to jobs that they do better. These are jobs that some economists say usually entail a level of education and training that is exceptionally difficult to obtain in the developing world. Thus, economists like Sachs say, developing countries get factories and jobs that they would not otherwise. Some would say with this situation occurs when developing countries try to increase wages because sweatshops tend to just get moved on to a new state that is more welcoming. This leads to a situation where states often don't try to increase wages for sweatshop workers for fear of losing investment and boosted GDP. However, this only means average wages around the world will increase at a steady rate. A nation only gets left behind if it demands wages higher than the current market price for that labor.

When asked about the working condition in sweatshops, proponents say that although wages and working conditions may appear inferior by the standards of developed nations, they are actually improvements over what the people in developing countries had before. It is said that if jobs in such factories did not improve their workers' standard of living, those workers would not have taken the jobs when they appeared. It is also often pointed out that, unlike in the industrialized world, the sweatshops are not replacing high-paying jobs. Rather, sweatshops offer an improvement over subsistence farming and other back-breaking tasks, or even prostitution, trash picking, or starvation by unemployment.

The absence of the work opportunities provided by sweatshops can quickly lead to malnourishment or starvation. After the Child Labor Deterrence Act was introduced in the US, an estimated 50,000 children were dismissed from their garment industry jobs in Asia, leaving many to resort to jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution". UNICEF's 1997 State of the World's Children study found these alternative jobs "more hazardous and exploitative than garment production". As Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman states in a 1997 article for Slate, "as manufacturing grows in poor countries, it creates a ripple effect that benefits ordinary people: 'The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise.' In time average wages creep up to a level comparable to minimum-wage jobs in the United States."

Writer Johan Norberg, a proponent of market economics, points out an irony:

[Sweatshop critics] say that we shouldn't buy from countries like Vietnam because of its labor standards, they've got it all wrong. They're saying: "Look, you are too poor to trade with us. And that means that we won't trade with you. We won't buy your goods until you're as rich as we are." That's totally backwards. These countries won't get rich without being able to export goods.

Heavy-handed responses to reports of child labor and worker rights abuses such as widespread boycotts can be counterproductive if the net effect is simply to eliminate contracts with suppliers rather than to reform their employment practices. A 2005 article in the Christian Science Monitor states, "For example, in Honduras, the site of the infamous Kathy Lee Gifford sweatshop scandal, the average apparel worker earns $13.10 per day, yet 44 percent of the country's population lives on less than $2 per day... In Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the average wage paid by a firm accused of being a sweatshop is more than double the average income in that country's economy." On three documented occasions during the 1990s, anti-sweatshop activists in rich countries have apparently caused increases in child prostitution in poor countries. In Bangladesh, the closure of several sweatshops run by a German company put Bangladeshi children out of work, and some ended up working as prostitutes, turning to crime, or starving to death. In Pakistan, several sweatshops closed, including ones run by Nike, Reebok, and other corporations—which caused some of those Pakistani children to turn to prostitution. In Nepal, a carpet manufacturing company closed several sweatshops, resulting in thousands of Nepalese girls turning to prostitution.

A 1996 study of corporate codes of conduct in the apparel industry by the U.S. Department of Labor has concluded that corporate codes of conduct that monitor labor norms in the apparel industry, rather than boycott or eliminate contracts upon the discovery of violations of internationally recognized labor norms, are a more effective way to eliminate child labor and the exploitation of children, provided they provide for effective monitoring that includes the participation of workers and their knowledge of the standards to which their employers are subject.

Arguably, the United States underwent a similar process during its own industrialization where child labor and the suppression of worker organizations were prevalent. According to an article in Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context, sweatshops became prevalent in the United States during the Industrial Revolution. Although the working conditions and wages in these factories were very poor, as new jobs in factories began to appear, people left the hard life of farming to work in these factories, and the agricultural nature of the economy shifted into a manufacturing one because of this industrialization. However, during this new industrialized economy, the labor movement drove the rise in the average level of income as factory workers began to demand better wages and working conditions. Through much struggle, sufficient wealth was created and a large middle class began to emerge. Workers and advocates were able to achieve basic rights for workers, which included the right to form unions, and negotiate terms such as wages, overtime pay, health insurance, and retirement pensions; and eventually they were also able to attain legal protections such as minimum wage standards, and discrimination and sexual abuse protections. Furthermore, Congress set forth to ensure a minimum set of safety standards were followed in workplaces by passing the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) in 1970. These developments were able to improve working environments for Americans but it was through sweatshops that the economy grew and people were able to accumulate wealth and move out of poverty.

In contrast, similar efforts in developing nations have not produced the same results, because of corruption and lack of democracy in communist nations such as China and Vietnam, worker intimidation and murder in Latin America—and corruption throughout the developing world. These barriers prevent creation of similar legal protections for workers in these countries, as numerous studies by the International Labour Organization show. Nonetheless, a boycott approach to protesting these conditions is likely to hurt workers willing to accept employment even under poor working conditions, as a loss of employment would result in a comparatively worse level of poverty. According to a November 2001 BBC article, in the previous two months, 100,000 sweatshop workers in Bangladesh had been put off work. The workers petitioned their government to lobby the U.S. government to repeal its trade barriers on their behalf to retain their jobs.

Defenders of sweatshops cite Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan as recent examples of countries that benefited from having sweatshops.

In these countries, legislative and regulatory frameworks to protect and promote labor rights and the rights of workers against unsafe and exploitative working conditions exist, and studies have shown no systematic relationship between labor rights, such as collective bargaining and the freedom of association, and national economic growth.

A major issue for the anti-sweatshop movement is the fate of workers displaced by the closing of sweatshops. Even after escaping the sweatshop industry the workers need a job to sustain themselves and their families. For example, in Bangladesh, a country in which has one of the lowest minimum wages in the world, of $68 per month, the Rana Plaza a known sweatshop that hosted garment factories for retailers such as Primark, JC Penney, Joe Fresh and Benneton, collapsed as it was visibly not structurally sound. After the incident many of the workers were displaced as not only did the Rana Plaza close down but the government also called for safety checks of many factories that were then shut down as a result of not being up to code. Although this may seem like a positive consequence many of those workers were then unable to get jobs and support their families. The garment industry in Bangladesh is worth $28 billion and employs over 160 million people, by closing down the factories through the anti-sweatshops movement many lost their livelihoods thus in order to truly be ethical the anti-sweatshop movement must create a solution for those that are out of work after the sweatshops close.

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Wage slavery

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wage slavery is a term describing a situation in which a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It has been used to criticise exploitation of labour and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labour and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops) and the latter as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy. The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their "species character" not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma and status diminution. Historically, some socialist organisations and activists have espoused workers' self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labour.

Similarities between wage labour and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labour and slavery, while Luddites emphasised the dehumanisation brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labour in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism and anarchism.

Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favourably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. The United States abolished most forms of slavery after the Civil War, but labour union activists found the metaphor useful – according to historian Lawrence Glickman, in the Gilded Age "[r]eferences abounded in the labour press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labour leader without the phrase".

History

Emma Goldman denounced wage slavery by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves".

The view that working for wages is akin to slavery dates back to the ancient world. In ancient Rome, Cicero wrote that "the very wage [wage labourers] receive is a pledge of their slavery".

In 1763, the French journalist Simon Linguet published an influential description of wage slavery:

The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him ... They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market ... It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live ... It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him ... what effective gain [has] the suppression of slavery brought [him ?] He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune ... These men ... [have] the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. ... They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?

The view that wage work has substantial similarities with chattel slavery was actively put forward in the late 18th and 19th centuries by defenders of chattel slavery (most notably in the Southern states of the United States) and by opponents of capitalism (who were also critics of chattel slavery). Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states, argued that Northern workers were "free but in name – the slaves of endless toil" and that their slaves were better off. This contention has been partly corroborated by some modern studies that indicate slaves' material conditions in the 19th century were "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time". In this period, Henry David Thoreau wrote that "[i]t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself".

Some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy as spurious. They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery as laborers were likely to have the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. However, later in life he concluded to the contrary, saying "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper".

African American wage workers picking cotton on a plantation in the South

Self-employment became less common as the artisan tradition slowly disappeared in the later part of the 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, the "gap in status between a 'servant,' a hired wage-laborer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might 'come and go' as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other. And, in the value system of the community, those who resisted degradation were in the right". A "Member of the Builders' Union" in the 1830s argued that the trade unions "will not only strike for less work, and more wages, but will ultimately abolish wages, become their own masters and work for each other; labor and capital will no longer be separate but will be indissolubly joined together in the hands of workmen and work-women". This perspective inspired the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834 which had the "two-fold purpose of syndicalist unions – the protection of the workers under the existing system and the formation of the nuclei of the future society" when the unions "take over the whole industry of the country". "Research has shown", summarises William Lazonick, "that the 'free-born Englishman' of the eighteenth century – even those who, by force of circumstance, had to submit to agricultural wage labour – tenaciously resisted entry into the capitalist workshop".

The use of the term "wage slave" by labor organizations may originate from the labor protests of the Lowell mill girls in 1836. The imagery of wage slavery was widely used by labor organizations during the mid-19th century to object to the lack of workers' self-management. However, it was gradually replaced by the more neutral term "wage work" towards the end of the 19th century as labor organizations shifted their focus to raising wages.

Karl Marx described capitalist society as infringing on individual autonomy because it is based on a materialistic and commodified concept of the body and its liberty (i.e. as something that is sold, rented, or alienated in a class society). According to Friedrich Engels:

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence.

Similarities of wage work with slavery

Critics of wage work have drawn several similarities between wage work and slavery:

  1. Since the chattel slave is property, his value to an owner is in some ways higher than that of a worker who may quit, be fired or replaced. The chattel slave's owner has made a greater investment in terms of the money paid for the slave. For this reason, in times of recession chattel slaves could not be fired like wage laborers. A "wage slave" could also be harmed at no (or less) cost. American chattel-slaves in the 19th century had improved their standard of living from the 18th century and – according to historians Fogel and Engerman – plantation records show that slaves worked less, were better fed and whipped only occasionally – their material conditions in the 19th century being "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time". This was partially due to slave psychological strategies under an economic system different from capitalist wage-slavery. According to Mark Michael Smith of the Economic History Society, "although intrusive and oppressive, paternalism, the way masters employed it, and the methods slaves used to manipulate it, rendered slaveholders' attempts to institute capitalistic work regimens on their plantation ineffective and so allowed slaves to carve out a degree of autonomy".
  2. Unlike a chattel slave, a wage laborer can (barring unemployment or lack of job offers) choose between employers, but those employers usually constitute a minority of owners in the population for which the wage laborer must work while attempts to implement workers' control on employers' businesses may be considered an act of theft or insubordination and thus be met with violence, imprisonment or other legal and social measures. The wage laborer's starkest choice is to work for an employer or to face poverty or starvation. If a chattel slave refuses to work, a number of punishments are also available; from beatings to food deprivation – although economically rational slave-owners practiced positive reinforcement to achieve best results and before losing their investment by killing an expensive slave.
  3. Historically, the range of occupations and status positions held by chattel slaves has been nearly as broad as that held by free persons, indicating some similarities between chattel slavery and wage slavery as well.
  4. Like chattel slavery, wage slavery does not stem from some immutable "human nature", but represents a "specific response to material and historical conditions" that "reproduce[s] the inhabitants, the social relations… the ideas… [and] the social form of daily life".
  5. Similarities became blurred when proponents of wage labor won the American Civil War of 1861–1865, in which they competed for legitimacy with defenders of chattel slavery. Each side presented an over-positive assessment of their own system while denigrating the opponent.
Noam Chomsky has written in support of labour movements.

According to American anarcho-syndicalist philosopher Noam Chomsky, workers themselves noticed the similarities between chattel and wage slavery. Chomsky noted that the 19th-century Lowell mill girls, without any reported knowledge of European Marxism or anarchism, condemned the "degradation and subordination" of the newly-emerging industrial system and the "new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self", maintaining that "those who work in the mills should own them". They expressed their concerns in a protest song during their 1836 strike:

Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
For I'm so fond of liberty,
That I cannot be a slave.

Defenses of both wage labor and chattel slavery in the literature have linked the subjection of man to man with the subjection of man to nature – arguing that hierarchy and a social system's particular relations of production represent human nature and are no more coercive than the reality of life itself. According to this narrative, any well-intentioned attempt to fundamentally change the status quo is naively utopian and will result in more oppressive conditions. Bosses in both of these long-lasting systems argued that their respective systems created a lot of wealth and prosperity. In some sense, both did create jobs, and their investment entailed risk. For example, slave-owners risked losing money by buying chattel slaves who later became ill or died; while bosses risked losing money by hiring workers (wage slaves) to make products that did not sell well on the market. Marginally, both chattel and wage slaves may become bosses; sometimes by working hard. The "rags to riches" story occasionally comes to pass in capitalism; the "slave to master" story occurred in places like colonial Brazil, where slaves could buy their own freedom and become business owners, self-employed, or slave-owners themselves. Thus critics of the concept of wage slavery do not regard social mobility, or the hard work and risk that it may entail, as a redeeming factor.

Anthropologist David Graeber has noted that historically the first wage-labor contracts we know about – whether in ancient Greece or Rome, or in the Malay or Swahili city-states in the Indian Ocean – were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money and the slaves another, with which to maintain their living expenses). According to Graeber, such arrangements were quite common in New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or in Brazil. C. L. R. James (1901-1989) argued that most of the techniques of human organization employed on factory workers during the Industrial Revolution first developed on slave plantations. Subsequent work "traces the innovations of modern management to the slave plantation".

Decline in use of term

By the end of the 19th century, both the use of the term wage slavery and its meaning declined.

The usage of the term "wage slavery" shifted to "wage work" at the end of the 19th century as groups like the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor shifted to a more reformist, trade union ideology instead of worker's self-management. Much of the decline was caused by the rapid increase in manufacturing after the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent dominance of wage labor as a result. Another factor was immigration and demographic changes that led to ethnic tension between the workers.

As Hallgrimsdottir and Benoit point out:

[I]ncreased centralization of production ... declining wages ... [an] expanding ... labor pool ... intensifying competition, and ... [t]he loss of competence and independence experienced by skilled labor" meant that "a critique that referred to all [wage] work as slavery and avoided demands for wage concessions in favor of supporting the creation of the producerist republic (by diverting strike funds towards funding ... co-operatives, for example) was far less compelling than one that identified the specific conditions of slavery as low wages.

Treatment in various economic systems

Adam Smith

Some anti-capitalist thinkers claim that the elite maintain wage slavery and a divided working class through their influence over the media and entertainment industry, educational institutions, unjust laws, nationalist and corporate propaganda, pressures and incentives to internalize values serviceable to the power structure, state violence, fear of unemployment, and a historical legacy of exploitation and profit accumulation/transfer under prior systems, which shaped the development of economic theory. Adam Smith noted that employers often conspire together to keep wages low and have the upper hand in conflicts between workers and employers:

The interest of the dealers ... in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public... [They] have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public ... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate ... It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.

Capitalism

Pinkerton guards escort strikebreakers in Buchtel, Ohio, 1884
 
Red Army troops attack Kronstadt libertarian socialist "wage slavery" critics who had demanded among other things that "handicraft production be authorized provided it does not utilize wage labour"

The concept of wage slavery could conceivably be traced back to pre-capitalist figures like Gerrard Winstanley from the radical Christian Diggers movement in England, who wrote in his 1649 pamphlet, The New Law of Righteousness, that there "shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man" and "there shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of himself".

Aristotle stated that "the citizens must not live a mechanic or a mercantile life (for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue), nor yet must those who are to be citizens in the best state be tillers of the soil (for leisure is needed both for the development of virtue and for active participation in politics)", often paraphrased as "all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind". Cicero wrote in 44 BC that "vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery". Somewhat similar criticisms have also been expressed by some proponents of liberalism, like Silvio Gesell and Thomas Paine; Henry George, who inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism; and the Distributist school of thought within the Catholic Church.

To Karl Marx and anarchist thinkers like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, wage slavery was a class condition in place due to the existence of private property and the state. This class situation rested primarily on:

  1. The existence of property not intended for active use;
  2. The concentration of ownership in few hands;
  3. The lack of direct access by workers to the means of production and consumption goods; and
  4. The perpetuation of a reserve army of unemployed workers.

And secondarily on:

  1. The waste of workers' efforts and resources on producing useless luxuries;
  2. The waste of goods so that their price may remain high; and
  3. The waste of all those who sit between the producer and consumer, taking their own shares at each stage without actually contributing to the production of goods, i.e. the middle man.

Fascism

Fascist economic policies were more hostile to independent trade unions than modern economies in Europe or the United States. Fascism was more widely accepted in the 1920s and 1930s, and foreign corporate investment (notably from the United States) in Germany increased after the fascists took power.

Fascism has been perceived by some notable critics, like Buenaventura Durruti, to be a last resort weapon of the privileged to ensure the maintenance of wage slavery:

No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.

Psychological effects

Wilhelm von Humboldt

According to Noam Chomsky, analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the Enlightenment era. In his 1791 book 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 laborer works under external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is". Because they explore human authority and obedience, both the Milgram and Stanford experiments have been found useful in the psychological study of wage-based workplace relations.

Self-identity problems and stress

According to research, modern work provides people with a sense of personal and social identity that is tied to:

  1. The particular work role, even if unfulfilling; and
  2. The social role it entails e.g. family bread-winning, friendship forming and so on.

Thus job loss entails the loss of this identity.

Erich Fromm argued that if a person perceives himself as being what he owns, then when that person loses (or even thinks of losing) what he "owns" (e.g. the good looks or sharp mind that allow him to sell his labor for high wages) a fear of loss may create anxiety and authoritarian tendencies because that person's sense of identity is threatened. In contrast, when a person's sense of self is based on what he experiences in a “state of being” with a less materialistic regard for what he once had and lost, or may lose, then less authoritarian tendencies prevail. In his view, the state of being flourishes under a worker-managed workplace and economy, whereas self-ownership entails a materialistic notion of self, created to rationalize the lack of worker control that would allow for a state of being.

Investigative journalist Robert Kuttner analyzed the work of public-health scholars Jeffrey Johnson and Ellen Hall about modern conditions of work and concludes that "to be in a life situation where one experiences relentless demands by others, over which one has relatively little control, is to be at risk of poor health, physically as well as mentally". Under wage labor, "a relatively small elite demands and gets empowerment, self-actualization, autonomy, and other work satisfaction that partially compensate for long hours" while "epidemiological data confirm that lower-paid, lower-status workers are more likely to experience the most clinically damaging forms of stress, in part because they have less control over their work".

Wage slavery and the educational system that precedes it "implies power held by the leader. Without power the leader is inept. The possession of power inevitably leads to corruption ... in spite of ... good intentions ... [Leadership means] power of initiative, this sense of responsibility, the self-respect which comes from expressed manhood, is taken from the men, and consolidated in the leader. The sum of their initiative, their responsibility, their self-respect becomes his ... [and the] order and system he maintains is based upon the suppression of the men, from being independent thinkers into being 'the men' ... In a word, he is compelled to become an autocrat and a foe to democracy". For the "leader", such marginalisation can be beneficial, for a leader "sees no need for any high level of intelligence in the rank and file, except to applaud his actions. Indeed such intelligence from his point of view, by breeding criticism and opposition, is an obstacle and causes confusion". Wage slavery "implies erosion of the human personality ... [because] some men submit to the will of others, arousing in these instincts which predispose them to cruelty and indifference in the face of the suffering of their fellows".

Psychological control

Higher wages

In 19th-century discussions of labor relations, it was normally assumed that the threat of starvation forced those without property to work for wages. Proponents of the view that modern forms of employment constitute wage slavery, even when workers appear to have a range of available alternatives, have attributed its perpetuation to a variety of social factors that maintain the hegemony of the employer class.

In an account of the Lowell mill girls, Harriet Hanson Robinson wrote that generously high wages were offered to overcome the degrading nature of the work:

At the time the Lowell cotton mills were started the caste of the factory girl was the lowest among the employments of women. ... She was represented as subjected to influences that must destroy her purity and selfrespect. In the eyes of her overseer she was but a brute, a slave, to be beaten, pinched and pushed about. It was to overcome this prejudice that such high wages had been offered to women that they might be induced to become millgirls, in spite of the opprobrium that still clung to this degrading occupation.

In his book Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt points out that professionals are trusted to run organizations in the interests of their employers. Because employers cannot be on hand to manage every decision, professionals are trained to "ensure that each and every detail of their work favors the right interests–or skewers the disfavored ones" in the absence of overt control:

The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology.

Parecon (participatory economics) theory posits a social class "between labor and capital" of higher paid professionals such as "doctors, lawyers, engineers, managers and others" who monopolize empowering labor and constitute a class above wage laborers who do mostly "obedient, rote work".

Lower wages

The terms "employee" or "worker" have often been replaced by "associate". This plays up the allegedly voluntary nature of the interaction while playing down the subordinate status of the wage laborer as well as the worker-boss class distinction emphasized by labor movements. Billboards as well as television, Internet and newspaper advertisements consistently show low-wage workers with smiles on their faces, appearing happy.

Job interviews and other data on requirements for lower skilled workers in developed countries – particularly in the growing service sector – indicate that the more workers depend on low wages and the less skilled or desirable their job is, the more employers screen for workers without better employment options and expect them to feign unremunerative motivation. Such screening and feigning may not only contribute to the positive self-image of the employer as someone granting desirable employment, but also signal wage-dependence by indicating the employee's willingness to feign, which in turn may discourage the dissatisfaction normally associated with job-switching or union activity.

At the same time, employers in the service industry have justified unstable, part-time employment and low wages by playing down the importance of service jobs for the lives of the wage laborers (e.g. just temporary before finding something better, student summer jobs and the like).

In the early 20th century, "scientific methods of strikebreaking" were devised – employing a variety of tactics that emphasized how strikes undermined "harmony" and "Americanism".

Workers' self-management

Some social activists objecting to the market system or price system of wage working historically have considered syndicalism, worker cooperatives, workers' self-management and workers' control as possible alternatives to the current wage system.

Labor and government

The American philosopher John Dewey believed that until "industrial feudalism" is replaced by "industrial democracy", politics will be "the shadow cast on society by big business". Thomas Ferguson has postulated in his investment theory of party competition that the undemocratic nature of economic institutions under capitalism causes elections to become occasions when blocs of investors coalesce and compete to control the state.

Noam Chomsky has argued that political theory tends to blur the 'elite' function of government:

Modern political theory stresses Madison's belief that "in a just and a free government the rights both of property and of persons ought to be effectually guarded." But in this case too it is useful to look at the doctrine more carefully. There are no rights of property, only rights to property that is, rights of persons with property,... In representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain […] there is a monopoly of power centralized in the state, and secondly – and critically – […] the representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere […] That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.

In this regard, Chomsky has used Bakunin's theories about an "instinct for freedom", the militant history of labor movements, Kropotkin's mutual aid evolutionary principle of survival and Marc Hauser's theories supporting an innate and universal moral faculty, to explain the incompatibility of oppression with certain aspects of human nature.

Influence on environmental degradation

Loyola University philosophy professor John Clark and libertarian socialist philosopher Murray Bookchin have criticized the system of wage labor for encouraging environmental destruction, arguing that a self-managed industrial society would better manage the environment. Like other anarchists, they attribute much of the Industrial Revolution's pollution to the "hierarchical" and "competitive" economic relations accompanying it.

Employment contracts

Some criticize wage slavery on strictly contractual grounds, e.g. David Ellerman and Carole Pateman, arguing that the employment contract is a legal fiction in that it treats human beings juridically as mere tools or inputs by abdicating responsibility and self-determination, which the critics argue are inalienable. As Ellerman points out, "[t]he employee is legally transformed from being a co-responsible partner to being only an input supplier sharing no legal responsibility for either the input liabilities [costs] or the produced outputs [revenue, profits] of the employer's business". Such contracts are inherently invalid "since the person remain[s] a de facto fully capacitated adult person with only the contractual role of a non-person" as it is impossible to physically transfer self-determination. As Pateman argues:

The contractarian argument is unassailable all the time it is accepted that abilities can 'acquire' an external relation to an individual, and can be treated as if they were property. To treat abilities in this manner is also implicitly to accept that the 'exchange' between employer and worker is like any other exchange of material property . . . The answer to the question of how property in the person can be contracted out is that no such procedure is possible. Labour power, capacities or services, cannot be separated from the person of the worker like pieces of property.

In a modern liberal capitalist society, the employment contract is enforced while the enslavement contract is not; the former being considered valid because of its consensual/non-coercive nature and the latter being considered inherently invalid, consensual or not. The noted economist Paul Samuelson described this discrepancy:

Since slavery was abolished, human earning power is forbidden by law to be capitalized. A man is not even free to sell himself; he must rent himself at a wage.

Some advocates of right-libertarianism, among them philosopher Robert Nozick, address this inconsistency in modern societies arguing that a consistently libertarian society would allow and regard as valid consensual/non-coercive enslavement contracts, rejecting the notion of inalienable rights:

The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would.

Others like Murray Rothbard allow for the possibility of debt slavery, asserting that a lifetime labour contract can be broken so long as the slave pays appropriate damages:

[I]f A has agreed to work for life for B in exchange for 10,000 grams of gold, he will have to return the proportionate amount of property if he terminates the arrangement and ceases to work.

Schools of economics

In the philosophy of mainstream, neoclassical economics, wage labor is seen as the voluntary sale of one's own time and efforts, just like a carpenter would sell a chair, or a farmer would sell wheat. It is considered neither an antagonistic nor abusive relationship and carries no particular moral implications.

Austrian economics argues that a person is not "free" unless they can sell their labor because otherwise that person has no self-ownership and will be owned by a "third party" of individuals.

Post-Keynesian economics perceives wage slavery as resulting from inequality of bargaining power between labor and capital, which exists when the economy does not "allow labor to organize and form a strong countervailing force".

The two main forms of socialist economics perceive wage slavery differently:

  1. Libertarian socialism sees it as a lack of workers' self-management in the context of substituting state and capitalist control with political and economic decentralization and confederation.
  2. State socialists view it as an injustice perpetrated by capitalists and solved through nationalization and social ownership of the means of production.

Criticism

Some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy of wage workers as wage slaves to be spurious. They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass declared "Now I am my own master" when he took a paying job. Later in life, he concluded to the contrary "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". However, Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans "did not challenge the notion that those who spend their entire lives as wage laborers were comparable to slaves", though they argued that the condition was different, as laborers were likely to have the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment.

Some advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, among them philosopher Robert Nozick, have said that inalienable rights can be waived if done so voluntarily:

The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would.

Others such as the anarcho-capitalist Walter Block go further and maintain that all rights are in fact alienable, stating voluntary slavery and by extension wage slavery is legitimate.

 

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