Wage slavery

Wage slavery describes workers’ dependence on wages as coercive or exploitative, despite their formal freedom to leave employment. The phrase is used in critiques of wage labor and capitalist property relations.

Wage labor: Employment in which workers exchange their labor for wages. Wage slavery is a critique of dependence created by this form of employment.
Étienne Cabet: A French utopian socialist whose writings criticized workers’ dependence on employers. His early nineteenth-century use of the phrase helped establish wage slavery as a political criticism.
Employment contract: An agreement setting the terms under which an employee performs work for an employer. Contract law treats consent and the right to quit as central, while wage-slavery critiques question their practical force.
Labor movement: Collective efforts by workers to improve pay, conditions, rights, and influence over work. Wage-slavery rhetoric has helped frame organizing as a response to dependence, not only low pay.
Labor market: The institutions and transactions through which employers hire workers and workers seek employment. Workers’ ability to refuse poor conditions depends partly on available jobs and bargaining power.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A French socialist and anarchist thinker who criticized property and hierarchical economic relations. His work supplied an influential critique of workers’ subordination under wage relations.
Republican freedom: A conception of liberty as independence from domination by another’s uncontrolled power. It distinguishes freedom from mere permission to leave, a distinction central to critiques of workplace dependence.
Eight-hour day: A labor reform campaign seeking to limit the standard working day to eight hours. Its demand challenged employers’ control over workers’ time, a recurring concern in wage-slavery arguments.
Economic coercion: Pressure exerted through material need or control over economic resources rather than direct physical force. The concept treats dependence on income as a constraint that can narrow meaningful choice.
Karl Marx: A German philosopher and political economist who analyzed capitalism, class conflict, and wage labor. Marx’s account of exploitation gave later uses of wage slavery a systematic economic framework.

Linked from 1 page

George FitzhughRelated: Fitzhugh used this comparison to condemn capitalism while defending actual chattel slavery.