Wage labor

Wage labor is employment in which workers provide labor services to an employer in exchange for wages or salary. The employer typically directs the work and owns or controls its output.

Employment contract: An agreement that sets the terms of work between an employer and an employee. It formalizes the exchange of labor for pay and specifies obligations on both sides.
Manorialism: A medieval social and economic system in which peasants worked estates under obligations to landlords. Its customary obligations differ from employment based on selling labor for wages.
Self-employment: Work performed for income by someone operating their own business rather than as an employee. Self-employed workers generally sell products or services without surrendering day-to-day work control to an employer.
Trade union: An organization of workers formed to represent members and improve their employment conditions. Unions counterbalance employers’ bargaining power in wage labor.
Labor power: A worker’s capacity to perform labor, treated in Marxian theory as a commodity sold for a period of time. Marx distinguishes the worker’s capacity, which is sold, from the labor performed on the job.
Enclosure: The consolidation of commonly used lands into privately controlled holdings, especially in England. Enclosure reduced some customary access to land and helped push people toward paid work.
Slavery: A system in which people are treated as property and compelled to labor under another’s control. Wage labor involves a paid employment relationship, unlike ownership of a person, though coercion can persist in either context.
Minimum wage: The lowest hourly, daily, or monthly pay employers may legally provide in a jurisdiction. It places a legal floor beneath wages in covered employment.
Wage: Payment made to a worker for labor, usually calculated by time worked or output produced. It is the direct compensation exchanged for labor services.
Industrial Revolution: The transition to mechanized production and factory industry that began in Britain in the eighteenth century. Factory growth greatly increased the scale and visibility of wage employment.

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