wage slavery
Economic servitude, modern
Wage slavery is a critical term for employment conditions where workers depend entirely on their wages for survival, leaving them little real freedom to refuse or leave exploitative jobs.
The phrase draws a deliberate parallel to chattel slavery, suggesting that economic coercion can be as binding as legal ownership.
It appears most often in socialist and labor critiques of capitalism.
He argued that minimum-wage workers were trapped in wage slavery, unable to save or advance.
- working poorEmployed but below comfort
- economic coercionMonetary pressure for compliance
- exploitationSelfish use of others
- labor exploitationUnfair treatment of workers
- sweatshopExploitative manufacturing workplace
company town · dead end job · nine to five · corporate grind · labor · underpaid · unemployment · golden handcuffs · class struggle · hamster wheel · worker solidarity · general strike · anti-capitalism · drudgery · boss · overtime · paycheck · treadmill
- class struggleclass conflict, class warfare, class divide, class struggle, class consciousness
- exploitationexploit, predatory, sex trafficking, take advantage, human trafficking
- labor systemsbonded labor, child labor, compulsory labor, contract labor, convict labor
- leftismMarxism, socialism, communism, leftist, socialist
- Victorian reformpoor laws, poorhouse, temperance movement, abolitionists, child labor
- MarxismMarx, Karl Marx, Engels, Friedrich Engels, proletariat
wage slaveryfinancial independence
Wealth sustaining indefinite living
self-employment · economic freedom · entrepreneurship · passive income · financial freedom
wage slaveryfair labor
Ethical treatment of workers
worker empowerment · collective bargaining · labor rights · meaningful work · workplace democracy
wage slaverychattel slavery
Persons owned as movable property
indentured servitude · serfdom · debt bondage · forced labor · peonage
wage, slave, wages, slavery, wager, servitude, waged, enslaved, enslavement