Wage slave? Or slave to the wage? | Hacker News Reader

Wage slave? Or slave to the wage?

ctrlaltdelmylife.weebly.com

74 points_delirium61 comments

The term "wage slave" annoys me greatly. You're a "slave" to whatever arrangements you can make to exchange your work for food and shelter. If you're a freelancer, you're a "slave" to finding clients and chasing payments, if you're a start-up founder, you're a "slave" to building and selling a product, if you're a subsistence farmer, you're a "slave" to cultivating the ground. The usage of the word "slave" masks the fact that "wage slaves" enjoy unprecedented freedom in choosing their "master".

Yes, there are unhelpful patterns in consumerism in which people more or less consciously reduce the options available to them, but I don't think talking about wage slavery is very meaningful in that situation, either: If you have trouble moderating your personal consumption, the uncertainty of self-employment is most certainly not for you.

There is a relation of order-giver and order-taker. If you are a wage slave, you obey someone called a boss.

Though I agree that wage slavery is better than chattel slavery.

And if you're a startup-owner then you obey a bunch of people called "customers". There is nobody who is free of all relationships.

That's the general point of the discussion, I think: trying to get yourself into a position where you have the most personal freedom, even if there is no such thing as perfect freedom.

I agree "slave" is being a bit overdramatic in most cases, though. I'd only really apply the metaphor to desperate people who really have no choice but to work a shitty job with no alternatives or prospects of escape (the quasi-indentured-servitude 19th-century working conditions that led to the term "wage slavery" being coined, and today applying to some migrant farm laborers and similar). But I saw the post using it mostly as a half-joking counterpoint to the "quit your wage-slave job and start a startup!" sentiment that gets passed around a lot.

the point of calling it slavery arises from having to take orders from some boss, not just from any particular boss.

if startup owners had few choices in life but to service some group of customers, i'd expect it would also be labeled slavery.

Most start-ups have a wide pool of "customer" bosses. If a few of them are uncooperative, they can refuse to serve them.

Employees can be ruined by the idiosyncrasies of a single boss.

"Wage slave" is an anti-concept used by individuals to rationalize their belief that coercive slavery can be morally legitimate. In order to do so, they must conflate voluntary impositions on freedom (doing what your boss says to obtain their property) with coercive impositions on freedom (doing what your owner says to avoid violence). At the start of the industrial revolution, the term was used by plantation owners in the South to attack factory owners in the North.

IMO the "slave" aspect comes from the cycle you get stuck in, rather than the fact that somebody gets to tell you what to do.

As Felix Dennis (*megarich entrepreneur) says, "A regular paycheck is like crack."

It's easy to become a slave to something that is, overall, so easy and comfortable and the default that everyone falls into & recommends & supports & views as normal.

> A regular paycheck is like crack.

> the cycle you get stuck in

Is a behavior being "self-reinforcing" or "addictive" a sufficient definition that allows us to distinguish between things considered slavery, and things not considered slavery? Should screenwriters of dramatic television employing cliff hangers, alcohol brewers, and coffee shop owners, be considered slave-holders? Would you hold that waking at a set hour of the day, and sleeping at a set hour of the day constitutes slavery, due to its cyclic nature?

What term would you use to describe situations involving claims of ownership over the production of others coerced to produce against their will under threat of violence or legal sanction?

Do you have evidence for that origin? As far as I'm able to find, the term originated among socialists in either the UK or the Northeastern United States, who were against both wage-slavery and the regular kind of slavery. I can't find any evidence that it was coined in the Southern U.S. by supporters of slavery, but sources admittedly seem a bit spotty (and I can believe that they would've used it for their ends if convenient).

The argument was invoked by John C Calhoun, Thomas Roderick Dew, and George Fitzugh in the beginning of the 19th century in their defenses of slavery.

Additionally, any form of socialism advocating for the abolishment of capitalism through political organization rather than voluntary abandonment also presupposes that one can legitimately claim ownership over the output and life of another through use of force.

Wage slave isn't a useless term, but isn't particularly accurate to refer to working conditions in most developed countries (though it does occasionally happen).

Working 16 hour shifts in a sweatshop for pennies an hour, with no option to quit because there are no other jobs available, that is wage slavery.

How is that slavery? Sounds to me like that person would consider themself very fortunate - they have a job when no one else does.

Such a person does not want to quit - they have found the best possible situation in their environment.

Because it's characterized by exploitation.

The same could be (and was) argued for actual slavery in the US. "At least they have food and clothes instead of being naked in the jungle." "At least now they're Christians." "They're not smart enough to take care of themselves - they do best with white guidance. It's a kindness."

Of course, it's not quite as bad as actual slavery. But it's close enough that using word "slave" isn't completely spurious.

I don't see any exploitation - they chose to work there, and they knew what the conditions were (presumably they talked to other people who worked there).

If you choose it, it's not exploitation. A slave did not choose it, therefor there is no comparison at all.

People do not do things voluntarily unless it makes things better for them. That means that to the employee, having this job is better than not having it.

But that's precisely wage slavery. It's using the threat of total unemployment (and therefore hunger and homelessness) to get away with offering shitty wages and horrific working conditions.

It may be free market economics, but that doesn't mean it's morally right.

You make it sound like there is just one employer in the area. And if there was just one, I'd agree with you.

But there isn't, there are lots of employers, and people pick the best.

If no one would be willing to go to the worst (or that employer only gets the worst employees) that employer would change their practices, and thus you get progress.

There is a balance here that is virtually impossible to change from the outside. People get exactly the working conditions they are willing to accept.

And the working conditions they are willing accept are match the living conditions they are in.

just go to where the jobs are, duh!

One of the most interesting books I read was "The Servile State" by Hilaire Belloc. Belloc suggests that in fact most people when desperate will gladly trade freedom for subsistence. He suggests the natural evolution of class warfare is from unrestrained capitalism to a welfare state, to one which legally compels workers to labor for the benefit of someone else. And indeed that's the system we have in the US, if you listen to folks like Cornell West and look into the prison industrial complex.

The way out, as both Belloc and his contemporary Chesterton (Note: I am NOT a Catholic. I am NOT even a Christian. I am not endorsing Chesterton's religious writings) thought was to try to push for an economy of the self-employed. This idea may seem less welcome on a VC site.... But the basic idea is that if labor and capital fight, both get to declare victory, but really Capital wins. The way to win if you are on the labor side is no to play the game, and go into business for yourself as an independent agent, freed from worker protections but also in a relative position of power and freedom compared to where you would be as an employee.

Time was when almost everyone was self-employed. The only reason it isn't for everyone is we make it so darn hard in the US. I say that as one who has been in Indonesia and Malaysia for the past six months and I can say that no third world country makes it as hard to be self-employed as we do in the US. Indeed no developed nation does either.....

As a chronically self-employed person, I'm curious why you believe it is so difficult to be self employed in the US. The World Bank lists the US as #4 on the Ease of Doing Business list [1].

Anecdotally, I've found it very easy to do the proper paperwork to become officially self-employed. For under a thousand bucks you can even have someone else do it for you if you're so inclined. Another personal example is how a man I met from Italy could not believe that I owned my own one-man business, as such a thing would be nearly impossible in his own country.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_Doing_Business_Index

There's paperwork? I was independent pulling in random 1099 work for 5 years and the only extra paperwork I did was "Schedule C".

I assume that owning a business proper would require a ton of forms and licensing. But just doing odd jobs for oneself? I didn't think anything special was required.

> I assume that owning a business proper would require a ton of forms and licensing. But just doing odd jobs for oneself? I didn't think anything special was required.

You don't need anything at all to do odd jobs under a 1099. I probably should not have said "officially self-employed" as that isn't really a thing. I meant I've gone through the hoops to become a sole-proprietor business.

If you wanted to incorporate you basically just file a few forms and sign on a few lines. It does not involve a great deal of paperwork, and even that can be reduced to signing on a few lines if you use an accountant.

I'm not an expert but the reason that I believe a lot of people in your position (1099-ing it for N years) incorporate is three-fold:

First, liability. Your corp can get sued into bankruptcy but your personal assets are safe. If you're not incorporated someone can sue you directly with more disastrous results. I'm not a lawyer but this is what I'm lead to believe is the case.

Second, tax-wise it can be in your favor to be a corp.

Third, it just keeps everything separate. Having a company account that I can pay myself out of keeps my books clean.

There's a difference between ease of getting into business, and the ease of making a living doing it. The debt economy ties people to jobs, particularly because of the fact that if you become self-employed, there will be a few years where you will likely not be able to cover your expenses and we have very little support for that. So unless you are already financially independent, you need financial help from someone else.

A lot of the legislation is a bit of a mixed bag. On the whole PPACA makes it easier perhaps to become self-employed because you can forego health insurance during the critical starting time, only to buy it if a real need arises or once one is making more money. On the other hand, the mandate to buy it later, imposes an additional burden on top of things like high self-employment taxes. On the whole I think PPACA does more harm than good because it can be very hard to predict when downturns will be sufficient to cause one to be able to cut health insurance out of one's budget.

Finally most of the ease of doing business factors are primarily about corporate business. It doesn't tell you much about being self-employed.

could something go wrong when workers are "freed" from protections?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsof...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Labor_p...

Why overlook unionization as a solution to the Capital-Labor power imbalance?

The problem is the Capital-Labor divide, not the imbalance. If you are going to look to unionization as a primary solution (rather than a solution of last resort) tackle this problem like they do in Germany: make sure the union has access to the business's financial records, and a seat on the board of directors.

Working a 8/9-5/6 job is historically an aberration, and never in human history has the majority of workers been employed that way. Even now, as (a small minority of) people in the Global South are moving to that kind of labor, we see that very same system breaking down in the West. People usually work piecemeal and irregular hours, in exchange for locally-valid credit.

It's a pipe dream to believe that the height of human happiness and social justice is everyone sitting down at a 9-5 job five days a week so you can pay down the mortgage on housing you overpaid for because everyone else also bought into the same myth. Which is what mainstream political parties in all countries that I know of seem to buy into, just with variations on the theme.

I like Chesterton's vision and see it as more emancipatory than the industrial-corporate socialism/capitalism that we have, despite me being a left wing crazy.

Will have to check out Belloc.

My grandfather worked in carpentry and construction, ultimately working his way up to overseeing construction of bridges. There was a time when you could hardly drive anywhere in St. Louis without crossing over a bridge that he worked on.

And doing construction work, he paid for his family's house over the course of about five years. It wasn't a palace, but it was a nice house in a (then) nice neighborhood with a good-sized lawn. Today, people routinely spend twenty or thirty years to buy a decent house. Even dumpy houses in poor locations would likely take well over five years for many people to pay for.

Something seems very wrong.

It's because we are building so many other things.

The price of a house depends on how many people there are to build it (like your grandfather).

These days people build all sorts of other things, so the price of a house goes up. But on the other hand you now have so many other cool things that weren't available back then.

> Working a 8/9-5/6 job is historically an aberration

Very much so. It used to be from dawn until dusk.

When hours were first instituted, it was always compared to farm work, since that was understood to be the hardest work possible.

EDIT: I see there's a lot of academicians with opinions. Anyone here grow up on a farm? Would you like to tell us about how easy the work is?

There's considerable variation in estimates, but most historians don't consider dawn-to-dusk to have been typical agrarian working hours, apart from peak weeks at planting and harvest. Data is really spotty, though, and before formalized hourly employment, it's not even really clear that people distinguished systematically between "working hours" and "leisure hours", so reconstructing it is difficult. To take one minor example, is "knitting by the fire while chatting with a neighbor" 100% work, 50% work, or something else? Perhaps it depends on whether it was a relaxed, half-working, half-chatting sort of knitting, or more industrious, but can we plausibly estimate how much of each was done in the 19th century? Even the distribution of how much of their day people typically took off for meals isn't well established (though it probably also varied by season).

Work wasn't considered something apart from social life. Basically, if something needed to be done, you did it. Things weren't nearly as compartmentalized as they are now. Agricultural lifestyles mean that life and work are much more integrated than they are now, because they had to be.

Which has pros and cons: people lived much more on the brink of survival, but a local area was also more self-sufficient. The trade we've made is to take risk of dying from starvation during a bad year where we are not self-sufficient enough for risks related to specialization, meaning we now have the equally uncontrollable risk of being screwed by a NYC financier or a DC bureaucrat.

It's also important to distinguish between different cultures and different time periods. A peasant in 15th century England lived a very different lifestyle than a peasant in 2nd century China.

Edited to clarify.

How is compartmentalizing work from home life related to "uncontrollable risks of being screwed by a NYC financier or a DC bureaucrat"? I'm not following.

If you're self sufficient, it doesn't matter how the economy is doing.

> but most historians don't consider dawn-to-dusk to have been typical agrarian working hours

Probably because they've never worked on a farm.

Ah, I didn't realize we were having an intellectual discussion at that level here. Your counter-argument to historical research is essentially, "fuck them ivory tower mothafuckas, I've got anecdotes"?

How true is this? Are you asserting that no historian or anthropologist has ever worked on a farm?

Or are you arguing that no living historian or anthropologist has ever been a pre-20th century peasant?

I've read a lot about the history of the work, and what you say isn't described by any of the historians -- until the advent of the industrial revolution, that is.

The time spent by hunter-gatherers is the least of all. Agrarian times -- when everybody farmed their own -- were more demanding but not all of the time for sure as the other commenter has pointed out.

During times when people were required to work for an "employer" (e.g. landowner) for rent, and then subsist on the time left, yes, they worked hard, but that is not unlike what we have today (just much more extreme).

As Clay Shirky describes in Here Comes Everybody, and you'll find in many other books as well, many skilled people would choose only to work as much as they had to get by, and spend the rest of their time in leisure or drunk.

I suspect that hunter-gatherers did "worse" on other metrics like quality and duration of life. Obviously, no metric is somehow objectively better than another, but many people will argue that working harder is worth it if you live longer and healthier (i.e. you rarely or never have to truly worry about having enough food to survive).

Clearly some (most) hunter-gatherers found that organized food production was a better alternative, since they were obviously the ones that became farmers.

It's complicated, but hunter gatherers typically lived longer than the first agriculturists. Infant mortality was the really brutal thing there--most people who made it to 15 would have a pretty long lifespan, comparable to what we. (Infant mortality was also very bad among the agriculturists, while they did not do as well in the years after 15.)

Beyond that, it wasn't a one way street--people regularly transitioned from farmer to hunter gatherer. Neither was a particularly hellish existence, except in times of plague, famine, or war (all of which hunter gatherers usually could avoid more easily, through lower population density and less demand on natural resources).

The hard evidence, as far as it exists, suggests that the typical hunter gatherer was, if anything, actually better off than the typical farmer. And for ages it was a constant back and forth. Where farming civilizations massively surpassed hunter gatherers was in the creation of the State and its associated violence-producing and self-perpetuating capabilities. Quantity (of people, of swords, of food) has a quality all its own.

See Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake of the Human Race" for an interesting perspective. http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

I'm quite familiar with that article, and I really like the hypothesis. I suppose it really comes down to what "satisfaction" or "happiness" or "better off" actually means. The popular book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" discusses this a lot as well, although the author seems to realize the futility in calling certain lifestyles/societies/governments "better" than others.

Let me tackle your last argument with another example:

Clearly some (most) junk-food-eaters found that eating junk food was a better alternative, since they were obviously the ones who kept eating junk food.

That kind of argument simply doesn't hold water. Humans do things which negatively impact them in the short term and the long term, repeatedly, consistently, and with relish.

"academicians with opinions"? Really? Have we reverted to name calling?

Few people here have grown up on a farm. But even if you have, it's not representative of what historians and anthropologists study when they study peasant societies. Agriculture is thoroughly embedded in the market nowadays. You can't compare the experience of a struggling family farmer in Iowa, under siege by corporate interests and the demands of the market, with the experiences of the average pre-industrial peasant. A businessman running a gas station in Dallas has more in common with the Iowa farmer than the pre-industrial peasant does.

There are very few places in the world nowadays that are comparable to even the recent (several centuries) past. There is, however, a lot of evidence about how people lived back in the day. Enough evidence, actually, that tens of thousands of people study it.

Anyone here grow up on a farm?

I grew up in a very agricultural area, and many of my young friends' families owned farms.

You really can't make any kind of comparison between modern farming versus old-timey farming. For example, you can now ride in an air-conditioned combine harvester where you can't chat with your friends, but you're not out in sweltering heat. You can clear vastly many more acres, but is it more or less 'work'?

Also, the amount of work would seem to vary tremendously based on season.

I think it's more interesting to look at pre-industrialized, non-agrarian life. Like, a shoemaker in a city. According to a historian on a Planet Money podcast, you might go a couple of days without doing any meaningful work. Just sort of hanging around the shop, going to chat with friends, and so on. Then, someone would have a need for boots. So, you measure them up, get to work, and a couple of days later you hand them their custom boots. The guy's claim was that these sorts of jobs involved quite a lot of just waiting around for your next customer/project.

The reason capital concentrates and hires labour is that Coaseian transactions costs render a complex economy of independent contractors uncompetitive and infeasible.

"I can say that no third world country makes it as hard to be self-employed as we do in the US"

I don't know what kind of self-employment you're talking about, but in some of the Third World countries it's pretty hard.

Here in Uruguay, unless you fall in the special category called "monotributo" (only for very low income), you have to jump through a lot of hoops (or pay a lot for a pre-made company), and pay lots of taxes, most of them are of the kind "pay now, we'll reimburse you later" and are reimbursed in tax credits mostly (not actual money).

Of course, you can also work illegally, and that's what most people did, that's why the "monotributo" tax was created, to make people pay at least a little tax and social security.

The same happens in Argentina, and Perú had such a huge illegal infrastructure that liberal economist Hernando de Soto made it his field of studies (at the beginning, it took 400 steps to be a legal company in Peru).

Professionals (such as engineers and programmers) fall under a different scheme, but it also entails several regulations and you usually always fail something in the eyes of the IRS equivalent (DGI) and have to pay fines.

Most of my experience here has been in Indonesia and Malaysia.

"Indeed no developed nation does either"

Are you kidding?

"I can say that no third world country makes it as hard to be self-employed as we do in the US. Indeed no developed nation does either....."

You are flat-out wrong there, my friend. Someone else pointed out how hard it is in Uruguay. Indonesia and Malaysia are not the whole of all 3rd world countries -- so your travels don't support your statement of "no third world country".

I can point out how hard it is all across Europe.

Being self-employed in the US is extremely easy.

Meanwhile most of those other first-world nations still offer their self-employed people healthcare and other safety net benefits.

I am sure that's why so many people are self-employed in most of these countries.

Also despite the issues in Europe, I understand that in many EU countries (including both France and Germany), there is a higher success rate of self-employment than here in the US.

I can't tell, are you being snarky?

I never said it discouraged anything or that people failed. It is simply 10x the complexity, hoops to jump through, legal paperwork, and tax rigamarole.

You could also start a business and not hire employees. It's not right for every business idea, but if you can manage it, it's pretty amazing.

Guilds and cooperatives may work where employees are required.

Indeed. I have no interest in building a company with employees, but owning and running your own one man product business sounds amazing.

My concern with this has always been that you can never really have any time off if you're supporting a product, i.e. always having to check your email making sure customer questions are being answered and your servers aren't on fire.

Your concerns are mistaken on multiple levels:

1. It's not really that hard to take time away from your business. It's a common fear but not based in actual experience, and therefore irrational.

When you have an established group of customers, yes, if you ignore support entirely for a while, you will likely lose a few. But if you have a largish group, losing a few won't matter. It's all about leverage. When you have a few customers, each one matters very much. When you have several hundred or several thousand, each one matters only a little. You have the leverage, instead of them.

That is why running a product biz is not "wage slavery" -- assuming you set it up right, which brings us to

2. If you want to be able to take lots of time off, design your business around it. Yes, if you create a mission-critical infrastructure service, you will either have to have support people in place. But you don't HAVE to create that kind of business. You can do something that's less mission-critical and with customers who are more laid-back.

3. There is a huge gulf between "totally ignoring your business" and "putting it on pause for a while." My husband and I recently took a month-long trip to NZ and we hired a very part-time support person to run interference while we were gone. She was able to answer basic questions, gather details about bugs, etc., and tell customers with harder issues that we would be back soon. I worked about an hour a day average (2-3 hours at a stretch, not every day). It worked great. Unusually, we had 1 server issue with our 2nd product. My husband took a bit of time to restart and contact our freelance sys admin, and that was that.

In the scheme of things, people will cancel for all kinds of reasons, many of which you cannot possibly control, and it's not a big deal. Commerce is a business relationship, and people end business relationships when they do not feel like they're getting a return of value for their money, and that's that.

I know some folks would consider it a deep moral failing to not do everything in one's power to deliver the world's best customer service. That kind of attitude will not make your customers any happier, but it will make you more miserable.

First, what Amy says.

Second, http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busin...

I run two software businesses. One of them is fairly critical. I'm taking off ~2.5 months this year for my wedding. (I.e. I anticipate less than 10 minutes a day of work during that... assuming I can't hire anyone to do it for me.)

I've previously sustained that level of work for weeks or months. It really is doable.

Good point. A responsible and moral person will feel an obligation to his employees to maintain the business.

Of course many business owners are disconnected enough that they don't rely on the income of a particular business and don't have qualms with cutting staff.

However, I think its important to understand the historical context of the term "wage slave".

Go back to serfdom. The lord owns the land, and in order to live there, a serf must provide service in the form of agricultural production or whatever else the lord wants him to do. Supposedly the lord or his king would provide "protection" by hiring knights and such. If the serf refuses to serve or pay up (by donating his harvest etc.) then he is removed from the land or killed.

This is similar to the way that a Mafia operates.

Fast forward to the "American System of Enter-prise".

Prise: "something taken by force," late 14c., from O.Fr. prise "a taking, seizing, holding," prop. fem. pp. of prendre "to take, seize," from L. prendere, contraction of prehendere (see prehensile). Especially of ships captured at sea (1510s).

pry (2) "raise by force," 1823 (originally also a noun, "an instrument for prying, a crowbar"), alteration of prize (as though it were a plural) in obsolete sense of "lever" (c.1300), from O.Fr. prise "a taking hold, grasp" (see prize (n.2)).

What might one use a pry bar for? Manacles.

In the American System of Enter-prise, capital (money) translates into land and business ownership and power. Rather than having land directly granted to the lords by the King, banks provide loans to those who can demonstrate a history of ownership (a parallel to the authentication of nobility). Rather than working the land directly for subsistence, workers are required to exchange wages for money to pay for food and the right to stay in their homes.

A worker who does not please his boss or the ownership will be fired and no longer receive wages. Because of urbanization, few people have the land, skills or other requirements for producing their own food, and must purchase food with money earned through wages. Without wages, the worker cannot pay his rent/mortgage. Therefore, a man who has been fired by his boss will starve and lose his home if he cannot quickly find another boss (owner).

Despite the introduction of money and new terminology, class structures and circumstances similar to those in feudal society occur in the contemporary system.

Sounds like the "E-Myth revisited" situation where the business was something that was not separate from her.

A "real business" is one that does not make you a slave to it: it's something that you own, rather than something you must be intimately involved in for it to continue functioning. You make money when you are sleeping.

Not sure where the downvotes are from on this, it's not exactly some horrible thing to say about someone: many businesses "are" their owners. But unless you recognize that, you'll never fix it.

Using the phrase "wage slave" to refer to a business owner who must make payroll even when profits are down is a bit of a stretch. A slave can't choose to stop working, but a business owner can cut payroll to zero by liquidating everyone and everything and taking a year long vacation.

A year long vacation? With what money?

And by that logic a wage slave can stop by quitting his job and taking a year long vacation.

Do you suffer from the belief that if you own a business you must be rich?

If you own a business and have a big payroll to make say more than 5 people at some salary between min wage and 100k/year then I would think they have far more freedom to extract themselves from the rat race than someone living hand to mouth working minimum wage. You are right, a business owner could be a slave to others if they are not profitable and he has debts to other entities.

Still, I reserve "slave" for those people lower on the food chain.

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