Wage Slavery - Applicable to [Nearly] Everybody?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

by singular • 16 years ago

27 48 16 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

looprecur7• 16 years ago

We're not there yet, but our economy has been headed in that direction for the past 30 years. Michael Lind has termed it "Brazilianization", in reference to the inequality and corruption one sees in much of Latin America due to the lack of a concern for social justice in the governing class.

Capitalist economies with no welfare state (laissez faire) converge to an economy where people have to work to survive, which depresses wages, which can very easily (and reliably) bring about a vicious cycle. The end state of this is one where the lucky among the proletariat become servants (paid a pittance, but in a nice house and well-fed, enabling a very nice life in comparison to the alternative) while the unlucky and poorly-connected (who cannot even find employment as domestic servants) starve. This would be very damaging to minorities and Latinos, because the upper classes would demand (and be able to get, due to the collapsed economy) white, formerly middle-class, maids and nannies.

Minimum wage and welfare programs aren't good just for their direct beneficiaries, but for a lot of people, because they raise the bar across the board. If minimum wage is $8/hour, then skilled workers will expect $15 and entry-level white-collar will expect $20. Increase that to $10, and skilled workers are now asking for $18, and white collar is asking for $25. Although this causes "inflation", it's the good kind because it represents a wealth transfer away from legacy and in favor of labor.

On the other hand, if there is no minimum wage (which is similar to a basic income but contingent on working) then the reference point collapses and everyone gets poorer.

CWuestefeld2• 16 years ago

Capitalist economies with no welfare state (laissez faire) converge to an economy where people have to work to survive

How horrible. If only we could get rid of that pesky market, everyone could lie about eating lotus flowers. Wait -- who is going to grow the lotus flowers for us?

it's the good kind because it represents a wealth transfer away from legacy and in favor of labor

First, why is taking away the fruits of one's labors to give it to another, less productive person, good?

Second, you're wrong. minimum wages cause unemployment in the very lowest ranks. Thus, minimum wage laws are a transfer of money from the very poorest people to the next rank above them.

houseabsolute2• 16 years ago

To be fair there is some evidence that in certain cases raising the minimum wage can, because of anchoring, raise wages overall without having a harmful effect on employment. But in general you are right.

What there is less evidence for is the entire thesis of the grandparent post.

Dove3• 16 years ago

That is my understanding of minimum wage as well.

If we raise the minimum wage to $20/hr, fast food will no longer be cheap. Some McDonalds will turn into nice restaurants, but as the minimum price of going out rises, more people will seek alternatives such as cooking at home (likely paying themselves a lot less than $20/hr, ironically). The net effect is to destroy an industry.

You can pity someone working for $4/hr doing hard agricultural work. But if you apply minimum wage to the situation, you don't raise his wage, you destroy his job. He likely needs the money; that doesn't help!

Hence, I have come to regard minimum wage as an act of oppression, and unmitigatedly evil. It should be abolished.

Avshalom• 16 years ago

>>How horrible. If only we could get rid of that pesky market, everyone could lie about eating lotus flowers. Wait -- who is going to grow the lotus flowers for us?

Umm.. the exact same people that grew them under communism, mercantilism, feudalism and non laissez faire capitalism. "The market" is a way to allocate 'capital': money, labor, and general stuff. It's not the only possible way. Further, an attack on laissez faire capitalism is not the same thing as an calling for the abolition of capitalism as a whole.

looprecur7• 16 years ago

By definition, a person who is working only because he must will not get a fair wage. One side has leverage, one does not. So the worker gets screwed.

The ideal society is one in which no one has to work but everybody does. A basic income grant (which everyone, working or not, gets) would get us pretty close to this, because most people would still work for reasons of pride and the desire for a better lifestyle than what's available if they don't. Those who would use the grant as an excuse to slack off are the least productive members of society anyway, so we'd not be losing much if they stopped working.

Minimum wage has its problems, because it's a very clumsy implementation of basic income that falls hardest on those who are trying to employ low-end workers. Better would be to give everyone enough basic income to live at a reasonable standard, and let a free market decide what's a fair wage. If that's 75 cents per hour, that's fine because work isn't the person's only source of income.

jswinghammer• 16 years ago

Laissez faire does not refer to the lack of welfare state but rather the lack of government interference in the economy in general. No state is currently even remotely like that. If you've been paying attention over the last 50 years the countries with the strongest presence in the economy typically do the worst. Exceptions are for countries with rich natural resources per capita like Norway or Sweden.

The free market naturally raises the standard of living and wages because it allows people to act in their own self interest and try things that might go really well or fail. The notion that minimum wage laws helps anyone outside of unions is laughable. It effectively puts a floor on wages and makes marginal work illegal. This means the young and unskilled don't get jobs while those who belong to unions do. This hurts the poor at the expense of the middle class. Countries in Africa that are quite poor often have very high minimum wages because they made the mistake you're making. High wages don't lead to prosperity. Prosperity leads to higher wages.

muhfuhkuh• 16 years ago

But, China has a centrally planned command economy built around subsidies, wholesale-rate or zero-interest loans and development grants, and nationalization. Of course, there is not one country on earth that has an economic trajectory as high. They are experiencing the largest uplift from abject agrarian subsistence to working- and middle-class job creation in the history of civilization. Obviously they do not have the raw materials within their borders to stem that insatiable hunger for growth, thus their foray into resource-rich Africa (and, btw, directly contributing to the relatively quick rise of the African middle-class, as well).

Heck the US during and after WWII was centrally planned, and it caused the largest economic growth the world has ever seen, until China's in the 1990s to now. Actually, one needn't look any further than the Marshall Plan to see that government intervention and fiscal stimulus can propel countries to prosperity worldwide.

Without a larger central body taking a macroeconomic view and actually being the "invisible hand" that Adam Smith relegated to the self-regulating market, Europe probably would have never recovered from either of the world wars and the US possibly wouldn't have seen the growth it did post-WWII.

pissmaster• 16 years ago

Liberals like you are destroying our country.

looprecur7• 16 years ago

I will gladly work to destroy the bigoted and heartless sort of society that conservatives and so-called "libertarians" seek.

scrod• 16 years ago

It's extremely refreshing to see your perspective on hacker news; I encourage you to continue posting. The free-market-fetishism around here is becoming nauseating.

looprecur7• 16 years ago

The Hacker News libertarians (who are, despite our shared nausea, far smarter and more reasonable than the right-wing of any other community, I'll note) believe they will be future technology "barons". Pretty much everyone I've ever met with conservative leanings expects to be fabulously wealthy one day-- the smart ones and the idiots alike. (I once heard a community college drop out making $8/hour defend Republican economics, opening with the sentence "if I make a few million dollars...")

At least 95 percent of them are going to achieve upper-middle-class status but not great wealth or connections. They'll have decent jobs and nice lives, but they won't be dick-swinging robber barons. They won't be on the short list for garden parties thrown by Sequoia partners. When this fate befalls them, they'll swing hard to the left.

houseabsolute2• 16 years ago

What a disaster, that people should have to produce to consume.

d4rt• 16 years ago

It's questioning the idea of work for wages, not the idea of producing in order to consume. An alternative system could be co-operatives or contract working, for example.

jerf• 16 years ago

In which either "work" is being done for "wages", or "no work" is being done for "wages".

There really isn't a way out of it. The first is isomorphic to what we have, the second utterly fails as an economic system.

The third alternative is to break wages, but as money is already essentially as powerful as it can be, all you can do is break its power down, and that's just "company scrip" again, which most people consider not so much a good thing.

TANSTAAFL.

Contract working isn't an out, either. Either we have the opportunity to do contracts already and some of us choose to work for wages, in which case we are not wage slaves because we have chosen it and you lose the right to complain about how we are wage slaves, or contract workers are themselves just disguised wage slaves. Either way, contracts can not be a solution to a problem we currently have; either we do not have the problem, or contracts are not the solution.

josh33• 16 years ago

Wage Slavery is a state of mind. You don't work for money. You work to get things you need, and possibly, if you create more value than you consume in getting those needs, you also consume some wants. Wages/money are just a lubricant that makes consuming easier. The real focus shouldn't be the wage, but the work being done. Is it creating value? If so, the world will pay you what you're worth, especially in the long run.

swombat2• 16 years ago

We're nowhere near Wage Slavery. As the Wikipedia article correctly points out, "Wave slavery" refers to a situation where people are paid so little that they cannot escape from their situation.

Certainly most of us on HN have the ability to work jobs where we earn enough to save money - whether we have the discipline to do so is, of course a different matter. Wage slaves were commonly paid wages such that there was absolutely no way for them to leave their job even for a few hours to try and do something else.

Today's economic systems, in the west, make wage slavery practically impossible.

run4yourlives3• 16 years ago

Today's economic systems, in the west, make wage slavery practically impossible.

That's a little misguided. For the uneducated, the mentally or physically disabled, or the financially burdened "wage slavery" can easily become the reality.

It takes being at a certain level in society to realize that you can create value in a way that is both competitive and creates a stronger bargaining position. It takes a level of understanding and confidence to do this that many people lack.

swombat2• 16 years ago

Ok, fair enough, that might have been an overly strong statement - but I maintain that it is true for the vast majority of the people on HN.

hugh36• 16 years ago

This term should be offensive to actual slaves. What do you think a real slave would say if he saw a free worker (who could at any moment quit, go to another employer, start a business, move to another country, go on holiday, join the army, become a priest, or just sit there slacking off safe in the knowledge that the worst thing that can happen is getting fired) complaining that he was a slave too?

silkodyssey• 16 years ago

I think you make a useful point. At a high level of abstraction "real slavery" and "wage slavery" seem very similar but for the people who were / are really affected it's a world of difference. It puts things in perspective.

hugh36• 16 years ago

There should be a word for this kind of thing: where you argue something moderately is bad by labelling it as a form of something universally acknowledged to be really bad. Terms like "wage slavery", "cultural genocide" or "raping the natural environment" fall into this category, and they all annoy me.

Perhaps this abuse of the language should be called "verbal bestiality".

gloob• 16 years ago

The intersection of programmers and people-who-feel-sorry-for-themselves consists of a bunch of people who will abstract away from reality until they've convinced themselves that they are somehow a victim.

theoneill• 16 years ago

It's just a figure of speech. There are plenty of other figures of speech that would be even more "offensive" if we applied this unreasonably strict standard to them.

hugh36• 16 years ago

Examples?

tyree731• 16 years ago

Exactly. People identify themselves as wage slaves when, if they were willing to forgo certain conveniences and societal pressures, could quite easily change their lives.

looprecur7• 16 years ago

Right. All they have to do is sell their kids so that they need less space (cheaper housing) and don't need to spend money on education, and then "wing it" with regard to health insurance. "Just don't get sick" is great advice that I'd give to anyone in this country; I mean, can you believe that people in the US think they have the right to get cancer? The fucking nerve of some people.

[Follow-up: On a serious note, I know that's an obnoxious reply, but I'm sick of conservatives who somehow believe the problem is that people are spending too much on unnecessary things. There is some of that, but most bankruptcies come from the big-ticket items-- housing, healthcare, and education-- which ought to be affordable.]

AmberShah• 16 years ago

I think slaves have bigger concerns in their lives than being offended to semantic technicalities. That aside, I think you sort of hit the point that even though we DO rely on our wage to survive, it's our choice and we have other options, which is what makes us different than the sweatshot workers.

looprecur7• 16 years ago

Depends on the kind of slavery. Slavery has been a fixture of most economies, with the degree of force and inflexibility variable across societies. In one phase of the Ottoman Empire, slaves could own land and armies... but were still slaves. Likewise, dalits and buraku can become very wealthy because they're doing work that no one wants to do, but their status as low-class individuals persists. Some variants of slavery (such as modern sex slavery and early American racial/hereditary slavery) are brutal and horrible; others have been more benign.

The state of the American proletariat is not quite slavery, but it's getting there. It's a state of diminishing leverage that, uncorrected, will lead to a slave economy. In first-world countries like the EU and Canada, it's unimaginable that someone would lose everything because of a health problem. Now, if you want to avoid (err, make less probable) this fate, you have to get a job that provides health insurance. (Don't even get me started on the terrorist attack we call the individual health insurance market.)

hapless2• 16 years ago

"Wage slavery" specifically refers to wage laborers who are unable to do those things.

If you have the ability to find other jobs, go on holiday, join the army etc, you are by definition not a "wage slave," merely a wage laborer.

wlievens• 16 years ago

Sure, but then there's the [applicable to anyone] subtitle in this post...

dhume• 16 years ago

a wage laborer can choose an employer, but he cannot choose not to have one

This here is the underlying problem. The free, competitive market does not have barriers to exit.

hugh36• 16 years ago

Anyone can start a business at any time. I'm not talking about an internet startup, I'm talking about a lawn-mowing business.

datapimp2• 16 years ago

Not everyone can start a business though. A business has to have employees.

datapimp2• 16 years ago

I think the important point isn't to compare our situations currently to 'Wage Slavery' but to acknowledge the history.

As a people, we have descended from serfs, slaves, and wage slaves. Wage slavery was a competing strategy for emerging industrialists, and a much more efficient one since they did not have to feed and house their wage slaves the way Chattel slave owners had to. ( Indeed, this was the argument the Southern slave owners used in favor of Slavery in the south. At least they took care of their property. The northern industrialists did not.)

So, we have descended from wage slaves. And the only reason we are much better off is because of the sacrifices made by other wage slaves who organized to fight for better working conditions.

Things like, you know.. the weekend, the 8 hour day, holidays.

singular• 16 years ago

Woah a lot of strong reaction to this, which is perhaps not unsurprising.

I certainly think it is extreme language and I certainly didn't mean to imply that, as well-paid professionals, the majority of people on HN would be in a situation comparable to those truly in terrible situations: both overt slavery and what really amounts to actual slavery. I see it as purposely strong language used for emphasis.

I'm thinking more of the relationship between the employer and employee; ultimately you rent your time in exchange for money, which arguably for the majority of people is just enough to live their lives with some greater or lesser luxury, but ultimately doing unpleasant work which, though of course to some degree is necessary and serves society, is largely in place to make rich owners richer. A large mass of population simply acts within a confined system as 'slave wages' servicing the needs of the rich while only subsiding at a certain living standard.

I am contrasting this with those of us (and ultimately this probably applies to far fewer HN'ers than the general public) who find a way out, i.e. find value in our work beyond that of its means to provide us with an income, or in fact become one of the rich ourselves.

This is not a criticism of capitalism either, especially since I personally believe capitalism is the best means of distributing wealth, assuming controls are in place to prevent abuses.

Wage Slavery - Applicable to [Nearly] Everybody?

Related Stories