Reserve army of labour

Marx’s term for unemployed and underemployed workers whose availability helps employers discipline employed workers and constrain wages.

Relative surplus population: Karl Marx’s name for workers made surplus to capital’s immediate labour needs. This is Marx’s more formal term for the population the reserve army comprises.
Capital accumulation: The reinvestment of surplus value to expand capital and production. Accumulation can increase output while displacing workers through changes in production.
Karl Marx: A nineteenth-century philosopher and political economist who co-authored The Communist Manifesto and wrote Capital. Marx developed the reserve army concept as part of his critique of capitalist production.
Keynesian economics: An economic tradition that explains persistent unemployment through insufficient aggregate demand and supports policy to stabilize demand. It locates unemployment primarily in demand shortfalls, unlike Marx’s structural account of labour surplus.
Labour discipline: The practices and pressures that secure workers’ compliance with employers’ rules and production demands. Marx’s reserve army helps explain how fear of job loss can discipline employed workers.
Industrial reserve army: The portion of the working class available to capital as an expandable labour force. It captures the reserve army’s direct role in supplying labour when production expands.
Surplus value: The value created by workers beyond the value represented by their wages, appropriated by capitalists. Marx links the reserve army to the conditions under which surplus value is produced.
Capital: Volume I: Karl Marx’s 1867 study of capitalist production, including its account of accumulation and employment. Marx gives his sustained analysis of the reserve army in this volume.
Phillips curve: A proposed relationship between unemployment and wage or price inflation, examined in several forms by economists. It frames unemployment as a variable associated with inflation, rather than chiefly as capital’s labour reserve.
Precarious work: Employment marked by insecurity, limited protections, or unpredictable hours and income. Underemployment and unstable jobs can extend the reserve army beyond the openly unemployed.

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