Wage slavery19th century female workers in Lowell,
Massachusetts were arguably the first people to use the term
"wage slavery"
Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages, especially in a total and immediate way.
The term's analogy between slavery and wage labor may refer only
to an
"[un]equal bargaining situation between labor and capital,"
particularly where workers are paid comparatively low wages
(e.g. sweatshops).
Or it may draw similarities between owning and employing a person, which equates the term with a lack of workers' self-management.
This covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical social environment
e.g.
working for a wage not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma or status diminution.
Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted at least as early as Cicero and
Aristotle.
A line in the original Star-Spangled Banner categorizes
"hirelings"
as
being in the same category as
slaves;
i.e. people
who weren't considered free.
With the advent of the industrial revolution, thinkers such as Proudhon and Marx elaborated these comparisons in the context of a critique of property not intended for active personal use.
Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery also invoked the concept of wage slavery to favorably compare
the condition of
their slaves to workers in the North.
The introduction of wage labor in 18th century Britain was met with resistance – giving rise to the principles of syndicalism.
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 pragmatic term
"wage work"
towards the end of the 19th century, as labor organizations shifted their focus to raising wages. Historically, some groups and individual social activists, have espoused workers' self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labor.
The first articulate description of wage slavery
was perhaps
made by
Simon Linguet in 1763:
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…
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?
Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states argued that 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.”
The description of wage workers as wage slaves was not without controversy.
Many abolitionists in the U.S. including northern capitalists,
regarded the analogy 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.
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.
However, 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."
Karl Marx described Capitalist society as infringing on individual autonomy, by basing it 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 Marx:
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.
African American
wage workers picking cotton on a plantation in the South.
American financier Jay Gould.
After hiring strikebreakers,
he said
"I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."
Proponents of the viewpoint that the condition of wage workers has substantial similarities
(as well as some advantages and disadvantages)
vis a vis chattel slavery,
argued that: 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 he 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.
Similarly,
various strategies and struggles adopted
by wage laborers contributed to the creation of labor unions and welfare institutions, etc.
that helped improve standards of living since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Nevertheless, worldwide, work-related injuries and illnesses still kill at least 2.2 million workers per year with
"between 184 and 208 million workers suffer[ing] from work-related diseases"
and about
"270 million"
non-lethal injuries of varying severity
"caused by preventable factors at the workplace".
--a number that may or may not compare favorably with chattel slavery's.
was perhaps
made by
Simon Linguet in 1763:
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…
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?
Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states argued that 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.”
The description of wage workers as wage slaves was not without controversy.Many abolitionists in the U.S. including northern capitalists,
regarded the analogy 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.
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.
However, 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."
Karl Marx described Capitalist society as infringing on individual autonomy, by basing it 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 Marx:
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.
African American wage workers picking cotton on a plantation in the South.
American financier Jay Gould.
After hiring strikebreakers,
he said
"I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."
Proponents of the viewpoint that the condition of wage workers has substantial similarities
(as well as some advantages and disadvantages)
vis a vis chattel slavery,
argued that: 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 he 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.
Similarly,
various strategies and struggles adopted
by wage laborers contributed to the creation of labor unions and welfare institutions, etc.
that helped improve standards of living since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Nevertheless, worldwide, work-related injuries and illnesses still kill at least 2.2 million workers per year with
"between 184 and 208 million workers suffer[ing] from work-related diseases"
and about
"270 million"
non-lethal injuries of varying severity
"caused by preventable factors at the workplace".
--a number that may or may not compare favorably with chattel slavery's.
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