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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

"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.

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.

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