Why is wage labor slavery

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Corporate Governance. Stay Updated. Rights and Permissions. A GPS-enabled scanner tracked my movements and constantly informed me how many seconds I had left to complete my task. The employer has the right, within broad bounds, to define the nature of the task, who performs it, and how.

This shows up in all kinds of surveillance, control, and submission — also known as maximizing productivity and extracting profit. It is no surprise, then, that there is a long history of comparing capitalist wage labor to chattel slavery.

By the time Steward wrote those words, the critique of wage slavery was at least fifty years old. 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.

Not everyone decrying wage slavery did so on egalitarian grounds. In the early republic, some racist white workers invoked wage slavery not to argue against chattel slavery and wage labor together but, instead, to maintain that white workers should not be reduced to the condition of black people. Freedom was, for racist figures like Fisk, a racial privilege rather than a universal end.

But that was generally the less common use of the term. Labor republicanism formed the guiding ideology of the Knights of Labor. Founded in , the Knights were the first national labor association to organize relatively unskilled black workers together with whites on a mass basis — an effort not meaningfully duplicated in the United States for another fifty years.

In , their membership peaked at nearly 1 million workers, with everyone from predominantly white Northern shoemakers to Southern black cane-cutters carrying a Knights of Labor card. Lacking any reasonable alternative but to look for a job, workers were in a structurally subordinate role.