Wage labour (also wage labor in American English)
is the socioeconomic relationship between
a worker and an employer, where the worker
sells his or her labour under a formal or
informal employment contract. These transactions
usually occur in a labour market where wages
are market determined.. In exchange for the
wages paid, 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 his or her 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. Various studies have shown that employees
generally spend 1.5 to 3 hours a day on non-work
related activities.
== Types ==
The most common form of wage labour currently
is ordinary direct, or "full-time". This is
employment in which a free worker sells his
or her 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.
He or she 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 his or her own initiative,
or he or she might hire out their labour as
part of a group. But he or she may also hire
out their labour via an intermediary (such
as an employment agency) to a third party.
In this case, he or she is paid by the intermediary,
but works 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 persuasively 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]."
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 his or her 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!"
== See also ==
== Footnotes ==
== Bibliography ==
Articles
Books
== External links ==
Barbrook, Richard (2006). The Class of the
New (paperback ed.). London: OpenMute. ISBN
0-9550664-7-6.
LaborFair Resources – link to Fair Labor
Practices
