Category Archives: Wage Slavery

Since the first iteration of slavery transformed into its more contemporary formsJim Crow, mass incarceration, redlining, employment and education discriminationthe toxic myth that black people can bootstrap their way to success and safety in a country that thrives on their subjugation has continued to thrive.

In a new report, Asset Value of Whiteness, Demos andthe Institute on Assets and Social Policy take a deep dive into the intrinsic link between racism and capitalism; specifically, how whiteness infests the so-called American dream and renders it inaccessible to anyone who doesnt meet the pre-selected criteria.

This is a truth that black and brown people in this country have always known, but one that white people invested in the maintenance of white supremacy have willfully chosen to ignore.

While Franklin Roosevelts New Deal and Harry Trumans Fair Deal laid the groundwork for a vibrant middle class, these sweeping legislations helped widen the economic gap along the racial fault line. This also holds true for the Servicemens Readjustment Act (G.I. Bill of Rights) of 1944, the affirmative action program created primarily for the benefit of white, male veterans.

These programs and their ramifications have exposed how a flat economic analysis does not get to the core of the racial discrimination and animus running through this country.

For centuries, white households enjoyed wealth-building opportunities that were systematically denied to people of color. Today our policies continue to impede efforts by African-American and Latino households to obtain equal access to economic security, explains Amy Traub, associate director of policy and research at Demos and co-author of the report.

When research shows that racial privilege now outweighs a fundamental key to economic mobility, like higher education, we must demand our policymakers acknowledge this problem and create policies that address structural inequity, Traub continues.

A few key points from the Asset Value of Whiteness:

The median white adult who attended college has 7.2 times more wealth than the median black adult who attended college and 3.9 times more wealth than the median Latino adult who attended college.

The median white single parent has 2.2 times more wealth than the median black two-parent household and 1.9 times more wealth than the median Latino two-parent household.

The median white household that includes a full-time worker has 7.6 times more wealth than the median black household with a full-time worker. The median white household that includes a full-time worker also has 5.4 times more wealth than the median Latino household with a full-time worker.

The average white household spends 1.3 times more than the average black household of the same income group. According to the report:

On average, white households spent $13,700 per quarter, compared to $8,400 for black households. Even after accounting for factors such as family structure, income, occupation, and geography, as well as wealth and homeownership, white households at all income levels continued to spend more than comparable black households, with low-income white households spending $1,200 more per quarter than low-income black households and high-income white households spending $1,400 more than their black counterparts.

Equal achievements in key economic indicators, such as employment and education, do not lead to equal levels of wealth and financial security for households of color, notes Thomas Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy.

White households have a leg up, while households of color face systematic barriers to growing wealth, reproducing our long-standing racial wealth gap over generations, Shapiro continues. Without policies that combat ingrained wealth inequalities, the racial wealth gap that we see today will continue to persist.

Asset Value of Whiteness is the most recent in a series of studies from the Institute on Assets and Social Policy and Demos analyzing policy solutions to close the racial wealth gap and ensure all Americans have an equal opportunity to participate in our economy.

What is clear is that a rising tide does not lift all boats if some of the boats have holes in them. For people of color, a rising tide can sometimes lead to us drowning that much faster.

Click here to read Asset Value of Whiteness.

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Attending College Doesn't Close Wage Gap and Other Myths Exposed in New Report - The Root

If you had to find a single statement that Americans from across the political spectrum can agree on, you might settle on we need good jobs to give people a crucial sense of self-worth. Fight-for-$15 activists assert the right to a higher wage, partly so they can stop taking government handouts like food stamps. Policy commentators, worried that automation could bring a loss of jobs, prescribe everything from subsidized corporate hiring to federal make-work programs. The congressional leaderships pitch for its policies hinges almost entirely on encouraging workand reducing public benefits.

But heres the thing: In historical terms, the pride we take in working for a paycheck is really new. Just 150 years ago, when people talked about the shame of dependency, they were referring to the reality of being forced to hold a job.

* * *

Speaking at the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee in 1859, Abraham Lincoln described wage labor as an unfortunate necessity only for the penniless beginner in the world:

If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.

In contrast, Lincoln laid out a vision of respectability that required avoiding a job:

In these free States, a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their familieswives, sons, and daughterswork for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other.

Farmers and craftsmen valued this independence in part because their time was their own, as it had been for skilled workers for generations. Describing nineteenth-century artisans in Birmingham, England, the historian Douglas A. Reid wrote, high piece-rates could provide good wages for skilled men, but they more often elected to take a moderate wage and extensive leisure.

Leisure meant time in the alehouse, time eating, drinking, playing marbles, or watching cockfights. Reid writes that even less-skilled workers and apprentices observed the informal weekly holiday known as Saint Monday if they could afford it, much to the dismay of elites and government officials. One observer in 1864 complained that an enormous amount of time is lost, not only by want of punctuality in coming to work in the morning and beginning again after meals, but still more by the general observance of Saint Monday.

That was the kind of life craftsmen in Lincolns day might have expected for themselves. But, as the sociologists Helga Kristin Hallgrimsdottir and Cecilia Benoit explain, rising industrialization in the late nineteenth century forced many skilled artisans to work for a factory owner rather than for themselves. The Knights of Labor, an early labor union, saw this dependence on an employerregardless of how much or how little was paidas wage slavery, a condition literally comparable to chattel slavery, which the country had only recently abolished. These unionists argued that working for wages was repugnant because capitalists siphoned off part of the wealth produced by the workers and told them when and how to do their jobs.

The only solution, as Knights of Labor founder Uriah Stephens put it in 1881, was the complete emancipation of wealth producers from the thralldom and loss of wage slavery. Workers and their unions interpreted that goal in many different ways over the next several decades, sometimes trying to return production to independent craftsmen, other times creating cooperative worker-owned enterprises, or advocating a socialist revolution.

* * *

Some workers saw more logic than others in harkening back to a pre-industrial independence. For example, to young, working-class white women, heading to a mill town to work for a wage might have sounded better than staying home on the farm. These women organized strikes to get better pay, but, to many of them, wage work itself was more liberating than not.

They knew as farm wives they would have little control over the farms profits and little disposable income, American literature scholar Julie Husband writes, describing mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1840s. These women explicitly rejected the label of white slaves that some political reformers and male unionists applied to them. Millworker Harriet Farley mocked the notion that to put ourselves under the influence and restraints of corporate bodies is contrary to the spirit of our institutions and to the love of independence we ought to cherish.

There is a spirt of independence which is adverse to social life itself, she added. And I would advise all those [who] wish to cherish it to go beyond the Rocky Mountains and hold communion with none but the untamed Indian and the wild beast of the forest.

Even for skilled white male workers, rhetoric identifying wage labor as wage slavery mostly dried up in the final decades of the century, as large-scale industry came to dominate manufacturing. By 1900, Hallgrimsdottir and Benoit write, both the Knights of Labor and the ascendant American Federation of Labor (AFL) generally used the phrase wage slavery to refer only to particularly awful jobs, especially those held by immigrant and black workers.

* * *

While some unionists still held out hope for the abolition of the capitalist system, many turned their practical attention to improving wage work. That required a dramatic shift in focus, as historian Lawrence Glickman explains in his book, A Living Wage. Mid-nineteenth-century skilled white male workers had believed that wage work not only degraded their economic status but undermined the independence that lay at the root of republican manhood and republican citizenship, he writes.

Wages have stagnated, benefits have evaporated, andreturns to capital have swelled.

As wage workers, they needed to regain pride and status. For some white, male unionistsparticularly those in the relatively conservative AFLthere were two intertwined ways to do that. One was winning higher wages and using the money to construct a respectable lifea carpeted parlor, ornaments on the mantle, a wife who could stay home to care for the family. The other lay in contrasting themselves with female, black, and immigrant workers, who, in their view, lacked both the power and the desire to push for better pay. Glickman quotes one labor leader, W.W. Stone, who drew the division like this: The Caucasian must add to his own individual needs the cost of maintaining a wife and family. There is rent to pay, clothing to be provided, books to buy, and, added to all this, the many little wants that arise out of the condition of a Christian civilization. In contrast, he continued, Chinese workers were content with a fractional interest in the body of a female slave.

* * *

Through the early twentieth century, unionistsincluding not just skilled white men, but also workers of other backgrounds, who organized in spite of the barriers erected by some white male union leaderspushed for better jobs. Glickman notes that this required not only strikes and demonstrations but also a new economic vision. In an age of big factories, workers recognized that it was no longer possible to reimburse any one individual for the value they added to a product. At the same time, they rejected the emerging economic consensus that supply and demand in the labor market would produce a correct wage. Instead, they created a new concept: the living wage, amounting to their rightful share in the products of common toil, as AFL President Samuel Gompers called it.

The labor movement achieved a great deal in this era. Working hours lessened, working conditions improved, and wages rose. By the end of the 1940s, historian David L. Stebenne writes, unions and management had essentially reached a truce. Workers repudiated socialism and stopped trying to win a say in how companies were managed. Companies provided pensions and health insurance to many employees and worked to keep employment rates high. For a few decades, things generally went quite well for workers, particularly white, male union members in urban industrial areas.

In recent years, of course, things have changed. A concerted political attack has hobbled unions, while globalization and automation have reshaped the economy. Wages for all but the best-paid workers have stagnated, and employee benefits have evaporated, while returns to capital have swelled.

Economists and policy analysts have a lot of different ideas about how we might respond to the conditions of laborers. Some suggest reinstating the postwar social contract. Others argue that the government should expand programs that subsidize the incomes of low-paid workers into a European-style welfare state, or even provide a universal basic income to everyone.

With that in mind, here are a few lessons we might draw from the history of workers opposition toand then acceptance ofthe wage system:

The biggest lesson, though, might be this one: things change. Whether we like it or not, technological advances and geopolitical shifts will alter the ways we work, probably in radical ways. Our values, and the places we find pride and shame, will change with them. Theres no guarantee about what any of this will look like, partly because it will depend on the choices we make about what were willing to fight for.

The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Mar., 1927), pp. 243-258

Wisconsin Historical Society

By: Douglas A. Reid

Past & Present, No. 71 (May, 1976), pp. 76-101

Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society

By: Helga Kristin Hallgrimsdottir and Cecilia Benoit

Social Forces, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Mar., 2007), pp. 1393-1411

Oxford University Press

By: Julie Husband

Legacy, Vol. 16, No. 1, Discourses of Women and Class (1999), pp. 11-21

University of Nebraska Press

By: David L. Stebenne

International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 50, Labor under Communist Regimes (Fall, 1996), pp. 140-147

Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class, Inc.

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Why Do We Take Pride in Working for a Paycheck? - JSTOR Daily

Meg and Patrick live an off-grid life most of us couldnt imagine.

HIPSTERS, drop your turmeric latte and turn down The Smiths, theres a new subculture of nonconformists on the block and youll need more than a bushy beard and a fedora to join in.

Enter the neo peasant.

Theyre fit, theyre frugal, theyre foragers, theyre facing our culture of extreme excess head on and they have very strong stomachs.

Think re-usable toilet paper, road kill for dinner, push bike-powered travel, homeschooling and humanure.

Neo peasants from Daylesford in regional Victoria, Meg Ulman and Patrick Jones, are defining the art of voluntary simplicity and reclaiming the skills, resilience and adaptability everyone is going to need in the future.

You wont find them in a supermarket, owning or driving a car, watching television, using a credit card or working the 9-5.

Their days are filled with foraging, hunting, preserving, brewing, bartering and fermenting to keep food on the table.

A neo-peasant is someone whos involved primarily in the household and community economies and resists wage-slavery, debt, and the heavily-militarised global economy, Mr Jones said.

They do not have to go to work to pay down debt, and therefore have time to organise and be accountable for their own food and energy resources.

Sounds better than your office job, right?

But dont be mistaken, a neo peasant hasnt got time to laze about.

Not many of us had to split wood to stoke our stove or hot wash the family cloth today the old flannel bed sheet Meg and Patrick have cut into squares and stitched to replace toilet paper.

By not buying toilet paper we save over $300 a year, Ms Ulman said.

Weve always been frugal, but its been about a decade since weve really concentrated our efforts to become dedicated non-polluters.

Neo-peasants Meg and Patrick with their children Zephr (left) and Blackwood.Source:Supplied

Its hot, heavy, hard work, but they are nauseated by the prospect of running down to the supermarket and buying a hot chicken for dinner dont worry, Ive asked.

We wouldnt touch a chicken from a supermarket because that hen has more than likely come from a prison-like existence and been tortured in death, Mr Jones said.

The packaged food of supermarkets is mostly laced with refined sugars, harmful additives and carcinogens, and the so-called fresh food is long-termed stored, sprayed with harmful methyl bromide, refrigerants or other nasties and has little nutrition.

Excuse me for a moment while I torch the entire contents of my pantry.

One look at the couples four-year-old, Blackwood, will also have you prizing that lollipop out of your toddlers mouth.

Woody has never touched processed sugar.

A treat for Woody is a mandarin picked off the tree, a handful of ripe berries or a sweet red capsicum, Ms Ulman says.

Patrick processing some road kill.Source:Supplied

We dont shop at supermarkets so there are no shiny packets or chocolate bars to entice him and we dont own a television so there are no ads to seduce him.

Ms Ulman said before they committed to a neo peasantry lifestyle they were riddled with anxiety and helplessness about the state of the world.

Mr Jones goes as far as to say its a move they made before they were forced to simplify with global economic contraction and even collapse.

We live in a culture of extreme excess, built on the myth of permanent growth and endless crude oil, he said.

This oil-induced affluence is fleeting; it cant keep growing because we live on a finite planet and the science fictions of mining other planets for resources is far-fetched and wishful thinking.

So lets look at the average Aussie.

We work all week for multinationals to buy appliances that cost us a lot in electricity to turn on.

Lets not get started on how much waste the average household turns out in comparison to Meg and Patrick theyve even found a way to re-use their own poo.

Humanure is composted and recycled, wastewater is filtered and fed into garden swales, food scraps from our own kitchen and local cafes are fed to our worms, chickens and ducks, Mr Jones says.

We shower once or twice a week.

The water is then piped into our garden.

The family also has two composting toilets, a rainwater washing machine powered by solar and strict rules about internet access for their 14-year-old son Zephyr who happens to live in a tiny house in the backyard that he co-built from recycled materials.

Zephyr helped build his own tiny house in the backyard.Source:Supplied

Four-year-old Woody is happily playing in the backyard after his first haircut.Source:Supplied

The neo peasants have a theory about tiny house living too, you see.

It is an expression of people using technology appropriately, and living within their means, Mr Jones said.

While the real estate market remains a giant Ponzi scheme the tiny house movement will continue to grow.

But if shovelling your own poo, washing your toilet paper or cooking up fresh road kill for dinner (as Meg and Patrick did on their 14-month foraging tour of Australia by bicycle) is too much to swallow; Kirsten Bradley from Milkwood Permaculture has some advice.

Start with changing one thing at a time, Ms Bradley said.

If you eat a lot of bread, learn how to make it.

Then stick with making your own bread until youre ready to add a new habit.

If you create these new habits every 6 months or so then within 5 years youll have made a fundamental change to your family life.

Meg making some Kefir milk.Source:Supplied

The boys standing next to the backyard veggie patch.Source:Supplied

Milkwood offer training courses in home gardening, bee keeping, natural building, permaculture and regenerative agriculture making mini neo peasants out of us all.

Murdoch University School of Arts Associate Professor Dr Carol Warren said there was something of a millenarian movement in the extremity of a neo peasants position on some issues but she conceded the idea we are morally-responsible to live within an ecologically-sustainable footprint was laudable.

The current prominence of food and energy security issues in global policy circles indicates that the neo-peasant focus on basic needs in a context of global environmental decline is a legitimate one, Dr Warren said.

You can follow Meg and Patricks journeys in neo peasantry at http://www.theartistasfamily.blogspot.com.

It's here! What we've all been waiting for, right? It's the definitive guide on how to spot a hipster. No need to stare at passersby any more wondering if they are in fact a hipster or not. Watch this video and you will know immediately. And remember: hipsters are grown, not born. Credit: YouTube/billygoatideas

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Living off the grid: Neo-peasants in Daylesford, Victoria take on ... - NEWS.com.au

Published 05/02/2017 | 06:00

An interesting life through the eyes of a slave driver

FarmIreland.ie

Books on self-help and business management have always been popular and many of them make useful reading, but one I picked up recently comes from a very different angle.

http://www.independent.ie/business/farming/rural-life/an-interesting-life-through-the-eyes-of-a-slave-driver-35409740.html

http://www.independent.ie/business/farming/article35409739.ece/4e461/AUTOCROP/h342/2017-01-31_bus_28185490_I1.JPG

Books on self-help and business management have always been popular and many of them make useful reading, but one I picked up recently comes from a very different angle.

An interesting life through the eyes of a slave driver

FarmIreland.ie

Books on self-help and business management have always been popular and many of them make useful reading, but one I picked up recently comes from a very different angle.

http://www.independent.ie/business/farming/rural-life/an-interesting-life-through-the-eyes-of-a-slave-driver-35409740.html

http://www.independent.ie/business/farming/article35409739.ece/4e461/AUTOCROP/h342/2017-01-31_bus_28185490_I1.JPG

Given its intriguing title, How To Manage Your Slaves, one feels that had it been published 2,000 years ago, it might well have topped the bestseller charts. I couldn't resist buying it and found the content both amusing and well researched, with lots of interesting historical facts concerning the ownership of slaves.

Now before you explode in anger at my purchasing and enjoying a book with such a politically incorrect title, bear in mind that it was written by Dr Jerry Toner, an Irish professor of classics at Cambridge University, using the voice of Marcus Sidonius Falx, a fictitious Roman of noble birth and a wealthy slave owner, as the narrator.

It is Falx who gives us detailed advice on purchasing slaves, how to encourage them to work harder, how to punish them and, in general, how to ensure we can get the best out of them while taking care they don't murder us in the meantime.

It even touches on the delicate matter of controlling sex among slaves, as well as with their owners, and when to set them free, which was apparently quite a common reward for being a good slave. The content gives us an insight into what life was like when people had a very different mindset to today and should be read in that context.

One wealthy Roman apparently kept a slave solely to note and remember the names of all the people they met and then remind his master of whom they were when required. Now that would have been useful. How many of us encounter embarrassing moments when we cannot recall the name of someone we know well? Politicians and auctioneers take note.

I would imagine also that anyone involved in difficult negotiations with intransigent trade union leaders might yearn for a time when you simply told your slaves what to do and if they refused or made a botch of the task, you could have them whipped or even put to death.

While the narrator is a fictional character, the book contains fascinating historical data as well as some horrific descriptions of the treatment meted out to any slave who attempted to defy his or her owner. But there were also many who gained their freedom and even went on to become wealthy Roman citizens and slave owners in their own right.

How To Manage Your Slaves deals with the period when the Roman Empire was at the height of its powers, but we must also remember that slavery was the norm in Ireland and Britain from long before that time, and continued for many centuries.

In the early fifth century, St Patrick was captured and taken as a slave by Irish raiders while St Brigid was the daughter of Brocca, a Christian Pict and a slave in Ireland. Early Irish law also makes numerous references to slaves and semi-free senclithe, and from the ninth to the 12th century, Dublin in particular was a major slave trading centre.

The King James I Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid-1600s, thousands of Irish men and women were sold to Antigua and Montserrat and by then, 70pc of the total population of Montserrat consisted of Irish slaves.

In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2,000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers. Some will argue they were "indentured servants" but, in reality, there was no difference.

The British were not the sole perpetrators of course and on June 20, 1631, the village of Baltimore in Co Cork was attacked by Algerian pirates from the North African Barbary Coast. They killed two villagers and captured almost the whole population of over 100 people, who were put in irons and taken to a life of slavery in North Africa.

It was only by the early 19th century that the ethics and morality of enslaving people was questioned and eventually banned, although it still continues to the present day in a more limited manner and under various guises.

Throughout the 'free' world, there are domestic servants still living in slavery and immigrants kept in awful living conditions. We are told that some are often paid virtually no wages, but are afraid to speak up for fear of being deported.

Send letters to: Farming Independent, Independent House, Talbot street, Dublin 1 or email: farming@independent.ie

Slavery comes in many forms and it is said that the only man who is truly free is the man who has nothing.

Some who own their homes become slaves to maintaining it and keeping up with mortgage payments.

Then there are wage slaves who spend their lives in the pursuit of money for status and to support and educate their families without spending time with their children, later realising it is now too late and life has passed them by.

Others, as they commute to work, might at times gaze in envy at a dropout from mainstream society living a simple life in the countryside. In the past, hermits and religious solitaries shunned wealth and chose poverty.

It is a form of freedom that Jesus, for one, recommended to his followers when he said: "Cast away your earthly goods and follow me."

So what is a slave? Many are slaves to alcohol and drugs, and most of us have become slaves to consumerism.

Just ponder on the aspirations of the average family in the 1950s and what they considered adequate for comfort and compare them to the same family today. It's a sobering thought.

Indo Farming

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An interesting life through the eyes of a slave driver - Irish Independent

By Paul Aizley, Las Vegas

Sunday, Feb. 5, 2017 | 2 a.m.

In the article As business owner, labor pick chafed at worker protections (Las Vegas Sun, Jan. 18), Donald Trumps pick for secretary of labor, Andrew Puzder, asks, How do you pay somebody $15 an hour to scoop ice cream? How good could you be at scooping ice cream?

If Pat scoops ice cream for an hourly wage, Pudzer should take a broader view. Consider why Pat is working: to pay for school, buy a car, pay medical bills or put a few dollars away for retirement. Pats wages should allow Pat to have a life. Can Puzder scoop all the ice cream? What is Puzders time worth? Pat is helping Puzder, and Pat is not a slave. Pat does not have a life if all s/he can do is pay for lifes minimal essentials. That is modern slavery.

What should be obvious to Puzder is that there is more to Pats life than scooping ice scream. With an adequate wage, Pat will be able to pay for more than lifes basic essentials and will not have to rely on help from the government to get by.

We hope for a secretary for labor, not a secretary for the corporation.

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Pudzer isn't looking at the big picture - Las Vegas Sun

Wage labour (also wage labor in American English) is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labour under a formal or informal employment contract.[1] These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages are market determined.[2] In exchange for the wages paid, the work product generally becomes the undifferentiated property of the employer, except for special cases such as the vesting of intellectual property patents in the United States where patent rights are usually vested in the employee personally responsible for the invention. A wage labourer is a person whose primary means of income is from the selling of his or her labour in this way.

In modern mixed economies such as those of the OECD countries, it is currently the most common form of work arrangement. Although most labour is organised as per this structure, the wage work arrangements of CEOs, professional employees, and professional contract workers are sometimes conflated with class assignments, so that "wage labour" is considered to apply only to unskilled, semi-skilled or manual labour.

The most common form of wage labour currently is ordinary direct, or "full-time", employment in which a free worker sells his or her labour for an indeterminate time (from a few years to the entire career of the worker), in return for a money-wage or salary and a continuing relationship with the employer which it does not in general offer contractors or other irregular staff. However, wage labour takes many other forms, and explicit as opposed to implicit (i.e. conditioned by local labour and tax law) contracts are not uncommon. Economic history shows a great variety of ways, in which labour is traded and exchanged. The differences show up in the form of:

Socialists see wage labour as a major, if not defining, aspect of hierarchical industrial systems. Most opponents of the institution support worker self-management and economic democracy as alternatives to both wage labour and to capitalism. While most opponents of wage labour blame the capitalist owners of the means of production for its existence, most anarchists and other libertarian socialists also hold the state as equally responsible as it exists as a tool utilised by capitalists to subsidise themselves and protect the institution of private ownership of the means of productionwhich guarantees the concentration of capital among a wealthy elite leaving the majority of the population without access. As some opponents of wage labour take influence from Marxist propositions, many are opposed to private property, but maintain respect for personal property.

A point of criticism is that after people have been compelled by economic necessity to no feasible alternative than that of wage labour, exploitation occurs; thus the claim that wage labour is "voluntary" on the part of the labourer is considered a red herring as the relationship is only entered into due to systemic coercion brought about by the inequality of bargaining power between labour and capital as classes.

Wage labour has long been compared to slavery by socialists.[3][4][5][6] As a result, the term 'wage slavery' is often utilised as a pejorative for wage labour.[7] Similarly, advocates of slavery looked upon the "comparative evils of Slave Society and of Free Society, of slavery to human Masters and slavery to Capital,"[8] and proceeded to argue persuasively that wage slavery was actually worse than chattel slavery.[9] Slavery apologists like George Fitzhugh contended that workers only accepted wage labour with the passage of time, as they became "familiarized and inattentive to the infected social atmosphere they continually inhale[d]."[8]

The slave, together with his labour-power, was sold to his owner once for all.... The [wage] labourer, on the other hand, sells his very self, and that by fractions.... He [belongs] to the capitalist class; and it is for him ... to find a buyer in this capitalist class.[10]

According to Noam Chomsky, analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the Enlightenment era. In his 1791 book On the Limits of State Action, classical liberal thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt explained how "whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness" and so when the labourer works under external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is."[11] Both the Milgram and Stanford experiments have been found useful in the psychological study of wage-based workplace relations.[12] Additionally, as per anthropologist David Graeber, the earliest wage labour contracts we know about were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money, and the slave, another, with which to maintain his or her living expenses.) Such arrangements, according to Graeber, were quite common in New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or Brazil.[13]C. L. R. James argued in The Black Jacobins that most of the techniques of human organisation employed on factory workers during the industrial revolution were first developed on slave plantations.[14]

For Marxists, labour-as-commodity, which is how they regard wage labour,[15] provides a fundamental point of attack against capitalism.[16] "It can be persuasively argued," noted one concerned philosopher, "that the conception of the worker's labour as a commodity confirms Marx's stigmatisation of the wage system of private capitalism as 'wage-slavery;' that is, as an instrument of the capitalist's for reducing the worker's condition to that of a slave, if not below it."[17] That this objection is fundamental follows immediately from Marx's conclusion that wage labour is the very foundation of capitalism: "Without a class dependent on wages, the moment individuals confront each other as free persons, there can be no production of surplus value; without the production of surplus-value there can be no capitalist production, and hence no capital and no capitalist!"[18]

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Wage labour - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

By Brooke Anderson - Climate Workers, October 3, 2016

Click here to download the sample resolution as an editable Word doc

[Sample] Local Union Resolution Against the Dakota Access Pipeline

WHEREAS, the $3.78Billion, 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline would carry over half a million barrels of dirty crude oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota, through South Dakota and Iowa to Illinois to connect to other pipelines bringing oil to the East Coast and the Gulf; and

WHEREAS, the pipeline is slated to pass through the tribal lands of Standing Rock Sioux near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, and underneath the Missouri River, the main source of water for the tribe; and

WHEREAS, the pipeline desecrates the ancestral burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux; and

WHEREAS, millions of workers including many union members their families, and communities live in the path of the proposed pipeline; and

WHEREAS, the transport of heavy crude is particularly volatile, leading to 18.4 million gallons of oils and chemicals spilled, leaked, or released into the air, land, and waterways between 2006 and 2014 in North Dakota alone, causing death, contamination of soil and water, and all kinds of disease; and

WHEREAS, scientists have warned that in order to avoid wide-scale, catastrophic climate disruption, the vast majority of known remaining fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground; and

WHEREAS, Native American land protectors and their supporters have been brutally attacked by private security forces with attack dogs and pepper spray; and

WHEREAS, Native Americans and other activists defending their land and water have the same right to defend their land and engage in non-violent protest as workers who are protesting the actions of an unfair employer; and

WHEREAS, the U.S. Congress has repealed the ban on exporting oil, meaning that the oil transported by the pipeline is likely to be sold overseas and not contribute to US energy independence; and

WHEREAS, we know that the real threat to workers lives and livelihoods is catastrophic climate change; and

WHEREAS, many large corporations, and especially fossil fuel corporations, have been putting profits ahead of the common good of workers, the public, and the environment, and these corporations have been granted the unjust constitutional rights and powers of person-hood, and the doctrine of money as speech through activist Supreme Court decisions thereby diminishing democracy and the voice and power of the people; and

WHEREAS, numerous national and international unions have already passed resolutions against construction of the pipeline, including National Nurses United, the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Communications Workers of America, the United Electrical Workers, and others; and

WHEREAS, this local union is already on record supporting the development of renewable energy sources and investment in sustainable energy including quality union jobs; and

WHEREAS, more long term good paying jobs would be created by investing in sustainable energy infrastructure projects using already existing technologies while at the same time reducing pollution that creates greenhouse gases; and

WHEREAS, we support the rights of our union brothers and sisters building the pipeline to work in safe environments at jobs that are consistent with respect for the environment and the rights and safety of frontline communities; therefore be it

RESOLVED, that we call upon the Federal Government to make permanent the moratorium on construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline by revoking permits for construction issued by the Army Corps of Engineers; and be it further

RESOLVED, that this local union calls on the labor movement to support a just transition to a renewable energy economy and investment in the construction of a nationwide sustainable energy infrastructure that will address the growing threat of climate change and its consequent droughts, floods, fire, crop failure, species extinction and other dire consequences of global warming; and be it further

RESOLVED, that this local union make a financial contribution of $_____ to the land protectors at the Standing Rock protest camps; and be it further

RESOLVED, this local union urges its internal union and the rest of the labor movement to become actively involved in promoting a just transition to a sustainable alternative energy economy that protects the environment and respects the rights of all working people to good paying safe jobs, human rights and justice for all; and be it finally

RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be forwarded to the International Union and all Central Labor Councils we are affiliated, with, with a request for concurrence.

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ecology.iww.org | Abolish wage slavery AND live in harmony ...

Wage slavery is a complicated term that has been used in many different contexts. There have been many references to its concepts by philosophers and the like, but the term is first recorded as used in 1836 by female textile workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, called the Lowell Mill Girls. The women in Lowell factories lived in boarding houses, often owned by the factory owners, and worked (quite frequently at young ages) about 70-80 hours a week. The textile factories tried to strive toward improving some aspects of these womens lives by offering them access to concerts and lectures, and they also insisted on high moral standards and church attendance. They paid relatively good wages for the time, prompting many to sell their freedom to earn a wage, which was resented expressly in a protest song written in 1836 by striking workers.

People tend to contrast wage slavery with chattel slavery, where a persons work and body are owned, not rented by an employer. Being a slave to wages may also be viewed as the condition of most people who earn money for work. In an economy that depends upon people exchanging money instead of a barter or trade system, making money is required to participate in that economy. In this interpretation, anyone who works for an employer is a wage slave, and this means that wage slavery would be common in virtually all places, and doesnt always imply that working for wages means working for less money than you truly deserve.

Some definitions of wage slavery are constructed differently. For instance, some say that wage slavery exists only when people work at jobs where they make just above the subsistence level and must put up with terrible working conditions and inability to create better working conditions due to suppression of unions. Such a definition of wage slavery identifies certain political structures as most common to produce it, including fascism, dictatorships, and some forms of communism.

Actually, a main goal of Marxian communism was to eliminate wage slaves by promoting self or community ownership of working environments, not government or private ownership and exploitation of workers. In all instances though, regardless of who owns the company, most people still had to work to receive necessities, and one definition of wage slave is that the person must work in order to survive. Failure to work limits ability to live in almost all government systems. Wage slavery may be viewed, too, as environments where employees have little to no public or governmental support if they cant work, and where they have little choice about where they can work.

Opponents of wage slavery say no workers can be truly free when there exists inequity in ability own property. While some argue that in capitalist systems, workers are free to use their earnings to buy their own property, produce their own products or start their own companies, its certainly true that many people due to lack of funds and despite hard work will never get there. Even in wealthy and developed countries like the US, it is argued that wage slaves always exist because a small percentage of the population controls the majority of the countrys wealth. Most people must submit themselves to an employer in order to survive, and people with little formal education or training may have the hardest time ever rising above the poverty level, though certainly there are exceptions. However, it is debatable whether having an employer/employee relationship is really comparable to slavery.

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What is Wage Slavery? (with pictures) - wiseGEEK

What is a wage slave?

So what exactly IS a wage slave, anyway? It's doubtful that you'd be exploring this web site if you didn't have some idea at least, but for the sake of ease, we'll clarify further.

Here are some brief and incomplete definitions from CLAWS members:

"Wage slavery is the state where you are unable to perceive choices and create courses of action different from the grind of the job."

"Wage slave: A wage earner whose livelihood is completely dependent on the wages earned."

The point here, of course, is that we don't have a single agreed-upon definition of wage slavery. Many of us prefer to focus on wage slavery as a state of mind, while others prefer to focus on the external aspects of wage slavery such as the wage economy. But overall, we seem to sense something rotten at the core of what we've been taught about "making a living", and that's the place to begin our questioning.

Have you ever noticed how many of us seem to live "lives of quiet desperation", as Henry David Thoreau puts it? We feel trapped by forces beyond our control, trapped in a mindless job, for the sake of money, status or recognition. We complain that we never seem to have the time for what's really important to us, because our jobs take so much energy and focus that we hardly have anything left over. We plod along day to day; sometimes we even dread getting out of bed in the morning.

We see the futility of the standard, socially approved path in America. It goes something like this: Go to school, get good grades, so you can get a "good" job, make lots of money, get a mortgage and a car and a spouse, keep up with the Joneses, and be "successful". We know it's not the path for us; we want to define success for ourselves. But we don't know how to forge a new path for ourselves, because, well, what would we do for money if we quit? How would we support ourselves? Sometimes there's a glazed look in our eyes; it's as if some part of us has died. We are just doing time, working hard and hoping for the next promotion, waiting for the day when we can throw off our shackles, quit our dull jobs, and finally live life. Everything gets put on hold until we have more time, or more money. Meanwhile, life is passing us by.

Perhaps you are one of these people. If so, CLAWS was created for your benefit. We have news for you: You do not have to live your life that way. CLAWS is here to inspire you to greater fulfillment, and to help you figure out how to get out of the endless cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and feeling chained to a job you don't care about.

We have other news, too: It won't necessarily be the easiest thing you've ever done. You have a choice, but you may have to re-examine your way of thinking very thoroughly. The pull of the socially accepted way of doing things is amazingly strong, and trips up the best of us despite our good intentions. It takes a certain kind of independent thinker to be "job-free". We use that term rather than "unemployed", in an effort to convey to people that we're proud, not ashamed, of not having regular jobs. We also make an important distinction between jobs and work. All of us do some kind of work, though not necessarily for monetary compensation.

Another thing you'll need if you decide to rethink your beliefs about jobs and money is the willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. It will take perseverence, and a commitment to throw out the limiting beliefs you may have unwittingly adopted. This is not the path for everyone. If your priority is comfort or social approval, or if you're the sort of person who doesn't rock the boat, CLAWS probably won't meet your needs.

If you embark on this path, it's important to know what it will ask of you. It may require you to disassemble, dissect, and tear apart your old beliefs, let go of some mighty persistent and tempting illusions, and build a new foundation for your thinking, sometimes from scratch. Are you prepared to do this? If so, you're in the right place.

Even if you have seen through the false sense of "security" a normal job offers you, and already questioned that approach to life, you may not really believe you can do it. You may still have questions about how to bridge the gap from the old way of life to a new one that you envision. That's where we can help, dear reader. CLAWS would like to see you devote yourself to the life you've dreamed of, the life your heart desires. We don't want to see you waste your precious days any longer. Life is short, and the time to pursue your dreams is NOW.

In the words of Norman Cousins:

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."

"The debt and work cycle is an ingenious tool of subjugation. Make people think they need all these things, then they must have a job, and they give up control of their lives. It's as simple as that. We live in one of the most free countries in the world, but we fix it so we are not free at all. " - Larry Roth

"Capitalism only supports certain kinds of groups, the nuclear family for example, or 'the people I know at my job', because such groups are already self-alienated & hooked into the Work/Consume/Die structure." - Hakim Bey

"Supposing we suddenly imagine a world in which nearly everybody is doing what they want. Then we don't need to be paid in order to work and the whole issue of how money circulates, how we get things done, suddenly alters." - Robert Theobald

"When survival or mere subsistence is at stake, a society can focus only on the overwhelming needs of the moment, and questions of meaningful work and leisure are considered purely academic. But we believe that the world has enough wealth to move all of humanity above survival and subsistence." - Alfonso Montuori & Isabella Conti, From Power to Partnership: Creating the Future of Love, Work, and Community

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wage slave - Why Work

Generations of workers critiqued wage-labor in the name of republican liberty.

In a recent interview, historian Quentin Skinner had the following to say about Karl Marx and the republican theory of liberty. The republican or neo-Roman theory says that we are unfree when we are subject to another persons will:

I am very struck by the extent to which Marx deploys, in his own way, a neo-Roman political vocabulary. He talks about wage slaves, and he talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat. He insists that, if you are free only to sell your labour, then you are not free at all. He stigmatises capitalism as a form of servitude. These are all recognizably neo-Roman moral commitments.

Skinner also says that this is a question which would bear a great deal more investigation than it has received.

I have been engaging in some of this investigation. It is not just Marx or even primarily Marx who believed that the neo-roman theory of freedom leads directly to a critique of wage-slavery. As early as the late 1820s, urban workers seized on the inherited republicanism of the American Revolution and applied it to the wage-labor relationship. They organized themselves city-by-city into the first self-conscious political parties of labor and their main campaign was against wage-slavery.

They argued that the wealthy keep us in a state of humble dependence through their monopoly control of the means of production. As Thomas Skidmore, founder of the Workingmens Party of New York, put it:

thousands of our people of the present day in deep distress and poverty, dependent for their daily subsistence upon a few among us whom the unnatural operation of our own free and republican institutions, as we are pleased to call them, has thus arbitrarily and barbarously made enormously rich.

Their humble dependence meant that they had no choice but to sell their labor to some employer or another. Their only chance of leading a decent life was if some employer would give them a job. Though formally free, these workers were nonetheless economically dependent and thus unfree. That is why they saw themselves as denied their rightful republican liberty, and why wage-labor merited the name slavery. Skidmore made the comparison with classical slavery the most explicit:

For he, in all countries is a slave, who must work more for another than that other must work for him. It does not matter how this state of things is brought about; whether the sword of victory hew down the liberty of the captive, and thus compel him to labor for his conqueror, or whether the sword of want extort our consent, as it were, to a voluntary slavery, through a denial to us of the materials of nature

The critique of wage-slavery in the name of republican liberty could hardly be clearer.

Given their analysis of wage-labor, these artisan republicans were inexorably led to radical conclusions about the conditions that could restore workers their full independence. Every leading figure of these early workingmens parties made some form of the argument that the principles of equal distribution [of property be] everywhere adopted or that it was necessary to equalize property. Here, the property to be equally distributed was clearly means of production. And it was to be distributed not just in the form of land, but cooperative control over factories and other implements.

For instance, the major report articulating the principles of the Workingmens Party of New York included the demand for AN EQUAL AMOUNT OF PROPERTY ON ARRIVING AT THE AGE OF MATURITY. Only with control over this kind of property could workers structural dependence on owners be eliminated. For these Workies following out the logic of the republican theory led not to a nostalgic, agrarian idealism, but to the view that each persons independence depended upon everyone possessing equal and collective control of productive resources. Even more striking, they argued that the only way to achieve this condition of independence was through the joint political efforts of the dependent or enslaved class.

As Langdon Byllesby, one of the earliest of these worker republicans, wrote, history does not furnish an instance wherein the depository of power voluntarily abrogated its prerogative, or the oppressor relinquished his advantages in favour of the oppressed. It was up to the dependent classes, through the agency of their workingmens parties, to realize a cooperative commonwealth.

There is an important historical connection between these radical artisans and Marx. As Maximilen Rubel and Lewis Feuer have shown, just at the time that Marx turned from Hegelian philosophy to political economy, in 18412, he began to read comparative political history. He was particularly interested in the American republic, and read three main sources: Beaumont, Tocqueville, and a less well-known Englishman, Thomas Hamilton. Hamilton was a former colonel who wrote his own, very popular observation of his time traveling in the United States called Men and Manners in America, published in 1833. For Marx, Hamilton was the best source of the three because Hamilton, unlike the Frenchmen, actually met with and spoke to leaders of the Workingmans Party of New York. That section of Hamiltons travelogue includes ominous references to the Extreme Gauche of the Workies who wish to introduce an AGRARIAN LAW, and a periodical division of property, and includes gloomy reflections on the coming anarchy and despoliation. It is these very sections of Hamilton that Marx copied into his notebooks during this period of preparatory study.

Unbeknown to Marx, he was copying a copy. In those sections of Men and Manners Hamilton had essentially transcribed parts of Thomas Skidmores report to the Workingmens Party of New York, which were a distillation of the ideas that could be found in Skidmores lengthy The Rights of Man to Property! Skidmores book included the argument that property rights were invalid if they were used to make the poor economically dependent, allowing owners to live in idleness, partial or total, thus supporting himself, more or less, on the labors of others.

If property rights were illegitimate the minute they were used to make some dependent on others then it was clear all freedom-loving citizens were justified in transforming property relations in the name of republican liberty. This was why Skidmore proposed the radical demand that the workers APPROPRIATE ALSO, in the same way, THE COTTON FACTORIES, THE WOOLEN FACTORIES, THE IRON FOUNDERIES, THE ROLLING MILLS, HOUSES, CHURCHES, SHIPS, GOODS, STEAM-BOATS, FIELDS OF AGRICULTURE, &c. &c. &c. in manner as proposed in this work, AND AS IS THEIR RIGHT. The manner proposed for this expropriation of the expropriators was not violent revolution but a state constitutional convention in which all property would be nationalized and then redistributed in shares of equal value to be used to form cooperatives or buy land.

Marx never knew these labor republicans by name, nor any of their primary writings, but it is clear from his notebooks that their ideas and political self-organization contributed to his early thinking, especially at the moment at which he was formulating his view of workers as the universal class. Indeed, in On the Jewish Question, Beaumont, Tocqueville and the Englishman Hamiltons accounts of the United States feature heavily in Marxs discussion of America. It is there that Marx makes the famous distinction between political and human emancipation, arguing that the American republic shows us mos
t clearly the distinction between the two. This was almost exactly the same distinction that the Workies made when saying, as Philadelphian Samuel Simpson did, the consequence now is, that while the government is republican, society in its general features, is as regal as it is in England. A republican theory of wage-slavery was developed well before Marx (see here for evidence of similar developments in France that were also very likely to have influenced Marx).

In the United States, the republican critique of wage-labor went into abeyance for a time after the 1840s, or more appropriately, it was absorbed into the agrarian socialism of the National Reform Association a tale masterfully told by the historian Mark Lause in Young America: Land, Labor and Republican Community. But labor republicanism exploded back onto the political scene in the United States after the Civil War, especially with leading figures around the Knights of Labor and the eight-hour movement. The Knights were for a time one of the most powerful organizations in the country, organized skilled and unskilled labor together, and at their peak included more than 700,000official members, probably representing more than 1 million participating workers. The Knights used the republican concept of liberty to assert the universal interests of labor and to argue for the transformation of American society. George McNeill, a leading Knight, wrote that There is an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government. Ira Steward, most famous as an eight-hour campaigner, demanded a a republicanization of labor, as well as a republicanization of government.

These turns of phrase were more than rhetorical gestures. They were self-conscious appeals to the republican theory. Indeed the Journal of United Labor even reproduced a famous passage on slavery from Algernon Sidneys Discourses on Government in order to articulate why wage-labor was a form of servitude. The passage goes:

Slavery. The weight of chains, number of stripes, hardness of labor, and other effects of a masters cruelty, may make one servitude more miserable than another; but he is a slave who serves the gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands and depend upon his will.

This passage, and Sidneys writings, have played a major role in contemporary scholarship on early modern republicanism, and here it is deployed to critique not the political enslavement to a monarch but wage-slavery.

In fact, the labor republicans not only drew on the republican theory but further developed it in light of the new dynamics of industrial capitalism. They noted that there were two interconnected forms of dependence. One was the general or structural dependence of the wage-laborer on employers, defined by the fact that the monopoly of control over productive property by some left the rest dependent upon those owners for their livelihoods. This, as George McNeil put it, meant that workers assent but they do not consent, they submit but do not agree.

The voluntaristic language here was meant to capture how, thought the workers were not literally slaves, they were nonetheless compelled to work for others. As Skinner has shown in his book on Hobbes, it is precisely this conflation of voluntaristic action and freedom that modern republicans have always rejected, and which their enemies, like Hobbes, have regularly defended. Though here, the workers dependence was not a feature so much of being the legal property of another as it was being forced, by economic need, to sell his labor:

when a man is placed in a position where he is compelled to give the benefit of his labor to another, he is in a condition of slavery, whether the slave is held in chattel bondage or in wages bondage, he is equally a slave.

Emancipation may have eliminated chattel slavery, but, as eight-hour campaigner Ira Steward once put it, the creation of this new form of economic dependence meant something of slavery still remainssomething of freedom is yet to come.

According to labor republicans, the structural dependence of the wage-laborer was translated, through the labor contract, to a more personal form of servitude to the employer. After all, the contract was an agreement of obedience in exchange for wages. It was an agreement to alienate control over ones own activity in exchange for the privilege of having enough money to buy necessities, and perhaps a few luxuries. Indeed, even if the wages were fairly high, the point of the contract was to become subject to the will of a specific owner or his manager. As one anonymous author put it, in the Journal of United Labor, Is there a workshop where obedience is not demanded not to the difficulties or qualities of the labor to be performed but to the caprice of he who pays the wages of his servants? As nearly every scholar of republican thought has noted, the language of being subject to the caprice of another is one of the most enduring rhetorical tropes of the neo-Roman theory of freedom. It is no accident that it would feature so heavily in labor republican arguments about domination in the workplace.

It was for this reason that the Knights of Labor believed that the only way to republicanize labor was to abolish as rapidly as possible, the wage system, substituting co-operation therefore. The point about a cooperative system was that property was collectively owned and work cooperatively managed. Only when the class differences between owners and workers were removed could republican liberty be truly universalized. It would, at once, remove the structural and personal dependence of workers.

As William H. Silvis, one of the earliest of these figures, argued, cooperation renders the workman independent of necessities which often compel him to submit to hectoring, domineering, and insults of every kind. What clearer statement could there be of the connection between the republican theory of liberty, economic dependence, and the modern wage-system? Here was a series of arguments that flowed naturally from the principles of the American Revolution.

To demand that there is to be a people in industry, as in government was simply to argue that the cooperative commonwealth was nothing more than the culmination and completion of the American Revolutions republican aspirations.

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Wage-Slavery and Republican Liberty | Jacobin