Wage slavery is a term used to criticize perceived exploitation of labor by owners of capital. It can be loosely defined as a person's dependence on wages for their livelihood, especially when pay, upward mobility, availability of jobs and working conditions are considered insufficient or poor.
The term is often used by critics of wage-based employment to criticize the exploitation of labor and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital, particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, such as in sweatshops,. and the latter is described 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 extreme poverty and starvation, but also of social stigma and status diminution... Historically, many socialist organizations and activists have espoused workers' self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labor.
Similarities between wage labor 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 labor and slavery, and engaged in critique of work.. while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labor 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 keeping African Americans in chattel 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 labor union activists found the metaphor useful – according to historian Lawrence Glickman, in the 1870s through the 1890s "[r]eferences abounded in the labor press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labor leader without the phrase".
History
The view that working for wages is akin to slavery dates back to the ancient world.The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1995. . p. 543. 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 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)..
Abolitionists in the United States criticized the analogy as spurious.. They argued 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 long as laborers were likely to develop the opportunity to work for themselves, achieving self-employment.. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. Later in life he concluded that "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. 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 (UK) 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". William Lazonick, summarized:Research has shown, 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:.
Similarities of wage work with slavery
Critics of wage work have drawn several similarities between wage work and slavery: 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".. 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 or to turn to crime. 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. 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."The sociology of slavery: Slave occupations". Encyclopædia Britannica. "The highest position slaves ever attained was that of slave minister [...] A few slaves even rose to be monarchs, such as the slaves who became sultans and founded dynasties in Islām. At a level lower than that of slave ministers were other slaves, such as those in the Roman Empire, the Central Asian Samanid domains, Ch'ing China, and elsewhere, who worked in government offices and administered provinces. [...] The stereotype that slaves were careless and could only be trusted to do the crudest forms of manual labor was disproved countless times in societies that had different expectations and proper incentives". 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".. 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.
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: