Concept
Wage labour
Overview
Wage labour (also wage labor in American English), usually referred to as paid work, paid employment, or paid labour, refers to the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer in which the worker works for a set amount of money under a formal or informal employment contract. These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages or salaries are market-determined. Wage labor is a service in standard economic theory.
In exchange for the money paid as wages (usual for short-term work-contracts) or salaries (in permanent employment contracts), the work product generally becomes the undifferentiated property of the employer. A wage labourer is a person whose primary means of income is from the selling of their labour in this way.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Wage labour is discussed.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers.
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
The very nature of production under a communal system makes it impossible for the labor of the individual to be private labor and his product to be a private product; on the contrary, it makes individual labor appear as the direct function of a member of a social organism. On the contrary, labor, which is expressed in exchange value, at once appears as the labor of a separate individual. It becomes social labor only…
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
author linked in the graph
Whoever derives his revenue from a fund which is his own, must draw it either from his labour, from his stock, or from his land. The revenue derived from labour is called wages; that derived from stock, by the person who manages or employs it, is called profit; that derived from it by the person who does not employ it himself, but lends it to another, is called the interest or the use of money. It is the…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
states what it is
The principle is understood in its application to any one employment, but not to the general mass of employment. For this there are several reasons: first, the operation of causes is more easily and distinctly seen in the more circumscribed field; secondly, skilled artisans are a more intelligent class than ordinary manual…
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy
states what it is
In that original state of things which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer. He has neither landlord nor master to share with him. Had this state continued, the wages of labour would have augmented with all those improvements in its productive powers, to which the division of labour gives occasion. All things would gradually have…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Philosophers who discussed Wage labour
Related ideas
- Karl Marx
- American English
- Liberalism
- Murray Rothbard
- Noam Chomsky
- Age of Enlightenment
- Wilhelm von Humboldt
- Working class
- Surplus value
- Means of production
- George Fitzhugh
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Communism.