Wage labour

Wage labour (or 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. These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages are market determined.

Definition

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 original personal inventor. A wage labourer is a person whose primary means of income is from the selling of his or her labour in this way.

Wage labour vs. other economic systems

In the theory of Karl Marx, wage labour is opposed to capital, in which a capitalist buys labour services and sells products or services produced by the workers. The capitalist makes a profit by selling the products or services above their production cost.

Wage labour has long been compared to slavery by socialists. As a result, the phrase "wage slavery" is often utilized, which refers to a perceived lack of bargaining power of the labourer, who must accept any wage or the wage is not enough to survive on.

Wage labour in the modern world

In modern mixed economies such as those of the OECD countries, it is currently the dominant form of work arrangement. Although most work occurs following 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.

See also

• Employment
• Labour economics
• Labour law
• Labour rights
• Wage slavery

References

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