The Fact
In the nineteenth century, labor republicans in the United States used the term “wage slavery” to criticize economic dependence in which workers without land or productive property had to sell their labor to survive and then submit to employer control in the workplace. Their argument was rooted in a republican idea of freedom as independence from arbitrary domination.
What This Means
“Wage slavery” was a real historical political concept, not a modern invention. It did not mean that wage workers were legally owned. It meant that some political thinkers believed formal freedom could coexist with material dependence strong enough to place a worker under another person’s power.
Sources
- Tom O’Shea, “Wage slavery: A neo-Roman account,” European Journal of Political Theory, first published online 2024.
- Oxford Academic, Labour Law Utopias, discussion of nineteenth-century Free Labour and wage-slavery arguments.
- EDITORIAL NOTE — PHILOSOPHY / HISTORY OF IDEAS
- This sheet describes a historical political argument. It does not equate wage employment with chattel slavery, racial slavery, forced labor, trafficking, or legal ownership of a person.