Wage Slavery in Today's Modern America - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15163936
I personally see a pattern of wage slavery here in the U.S. I am sure other forum members would agree. This particular article discusses this apparent reality here in today's modern day America.

Alex Gourevitch of Jacobin wrote:It is natural to think there is something deeply unfree about work in the contemporary United States. Describing her job in an Amazon warehouse, journalist Emily Guendelsberger writes, “I walked up to sixteen miles a day to keep up with the rate at which I was supposed to pick orders. A GPS-enabled scanner tracked my movements and constantly informed me how many seconds I had left to complete my task.” A man employed at a different facility said he found pervasive surveillance and inhuman speed “so soul-sucking I found myself nearly crying in my car right before I was supposed to walk in.”

That feeling is connected to a real material fact about the workplace: one of the defining features of the employment relationship in all capitalist countries is that the worker’s will is, by law, “subordinate” to the employers. 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.

Just consider who controls one of the body’s most essential functions: going to the bathroom. Workers in the United States can be forced to urinate during employer-mandated drug testing; or forbidden from urinating if it isn’t break time. In Amazon warehouses, workers, whose every move is tracked, forego trips to the restroom to avoid being disciplined or fired for too much “time off task.” In a poultry-packing plant, employees were forced to wear diapers to work because they said they knew they would be let go if they demanded the bathroom breaks their bosses denied them. Employers control or seek to control many other aspects of workers’ lives, from their Facebook posts and political speech to the wages they earn and the rates at which they work.

It is no surprise, then, that there is a long history of comparing capitalist wage labor to chattel slavery.

In 1873, Ira Steward, son of abolitionists and founder of the eight-hours movement, looked out over the United States’ industrial sweatshops, its fourteen-hour days for poverty wages, and wrote, “Something of slavery still remains.” His point was not that wage labor and slavery were the same, but that, for all the talk of emancipation, many aspects of the employment relationship smacked more of servitude than of freedom.


The author, Alex Gourevitch, further writes:

Alex Gourevitch of Jacobin wrote:After the Civil War, the critique of “wage slavery” really took off. A group I have elsewhere called “labor republicans” drew on and extended the earlier views of people like Skidmore and Evans to argue that capitalist labor relations failed to live up to their promise. Labor republicanism formed the guiding ideology of the Knights of Labor. Founded in 1869, 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 1886, 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.

In articles with titles like “Wages Slavery and Chattel Slavery,” the Knights argued that “the whole process of civilization has been to emancipate human beings from the condition of slavery in which they have been held by their fellow men . . . [however] civilization has not yet reached its highest point of development, nor can it develop much further without first having abolished wages slavery, for that form of slavery stands to-day as one of the greatest barriers to the progress of civilization.”

This “wage slavery,” the Knights contended, first appeared in the dependence of propertyless workers on their employers. Lacking any reasonable alternative but to look for a job, workers were in a structurally subordinate role. This made the labor contract something less than fully free. As George E. McNeill, one of the Knights’ leading figures, put it, in a labor contract, the workers “assent but they do not consent, they submit but they do not agree.”


https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/wage ... ders-labor
#15163997
Seems like its leading up to the concept of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_accumulation_of_capital

It is interesting to put this in the context of Lincoln's speech where he talks about 'free labor' and you can see how it is an almost utopian sense of the structural relation which reproduces workers as workers. The idea that work is justified as long as it has the prospect of someone saving up money from their hard work to live some modicum of comfort for themselves and family. It is in a time where he seems to emphasize the fact of many people as farmers who can work to produces use-values for themselves. Something which was quite significant for many during the great depression but inaccessible to the many urban workers who were propertyless in terms of production.
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/fair.htm
Compared to his political speeches, this effort suffers from tedium, but it contains interesting passages on free labor and education. He exhorted his audience to "prefer free labor, with its natural companion, education." He saw agriculture as an opportunity for "cultivated thought," saying, "Every blade of grass is a study; and to produce two, where there was but one, is both a profit and a pleasure."
...
The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor -- the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all -- gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune. I have said this much about the elements of labor generally, as introductory to the consideration of a new phase which that element is in process of assuming. The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees, so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now, especially in these free States, nearly all are educated -- quite too nearly all, to leave the labor of the uneducated, in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small per centage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive. From these premises the problem springs, "How can labor and education be the most satisfactory combined?"

By the "mud-sill" theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be -- all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous. In fact, it is, in some sort, deemed a misfortune that laborers should have heads at all. Those same heads are regarded as explosive materials, only to be safely kept in damp places, as far as possible from that peculiar sort of fire which ignites them. A Yankee who could invent strong handed man without a head would receive the everlasting gratitude of the "mud-sill" advocates.

But Free Labor says "no!" Free Labor argues that, as the Author of man makes every individual with one head and one pair of hands, it was probably intended that heads and hands should cooperate as friends; and that that particular head, should direct and control that particular pair of hands. As each man has one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands to furnish food, it was probably intended that that particular pair of hands should feed that particular mouth -- that each head is the natural guardian, director, and protector of the hands and mouth inseparably connected with it; and that being so, every head should be cultivated, and improved, by whatever will add to its capacity for performing its charge. In one word Free Labor insists on universal education.


But of course anyone acquainted with some elementary Marxism can emphasize the reciprocal relationship between the structural relations of depriving the majority of production as shared property to coerce them to work by an artificial scarcity.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Complex-processes.pdf
Marx saw in his youth poor landless peasants who were being mistreated by the landed aristocracy. The British had the most highly developed form of modern industry. So Marx looked back through British history and he found in the Enclosures of the 17th and 18th century the roots of capitalism: peasants were driven off the land to leave room for sheep which were now more profitable than farmers. This created an atomised mass of impoverished vagabonds, alongside a wealthy farming elite. But this was not a self-sustaining process; robbery could not explain the on-going expansion of capital. Nor could the invention of new machinery. If this were the case, capitalism would have arisen centuries ago in China where technology was more advanced. Marx found that this mass of labourers with no access to their means of production, gathered together in the towns and desperate for work became a proletariat and anyone who had capital to purchase land and materials enough for one cycle of production could hire these workers and keep them on the poverty line so they could never get enough money to own their own means of production, and in this way capital could reproduce itself and reproduce the mass of impoverished proletarians it needed to exploit. This relation – cheap labour power bought and sold on the market as a commodity – was the key, the germ cell which grew into modern capitalism. Once this was in place, machinery could be used to increase the productivity of labour.

https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/
I like the way Clarke develop his proof this problem: Commodity exchange presupposes individuals with different needs and different resources because if everyone had the same stuff there would be no reason for exchange. Thus exchange presupposes differences. If exchange is systematic these differences must also be systematic. Thus the formal equality and freedom of exchange is founded on different resource endowments. This means that the content of exchange can’t be reduced to its form (free, juridically equal relations between people) but must be found outside of exchange in the realm of production and property.

Scarcity relates to the application of labor to produce for need. The basis of exchange is the sale of the products of this labor. Thus the need for a theory of value based on human labor, not subjective whims.

Different types of exchange presuppose different production and property relations. The simple commodity exchange (independent producers exchanging the product of their labor in the market) is a popular image in marginalist accounts of exchange (as well as market-anarchism fantasies) yet such a system of exchange has only existed within larger societies dominated by other social relations (ie feudalism, capitalism, state-capitalism/20th century communism). Capitalist exchange presupposes social relations between two social classes, one owning the means of production, the other nothing. As we’ve seen, Marginalism tries to treat all factors of production with the same theoretical tools of subjective preference theory. But the division of the social product into rent, profit and wages actually presupposes antagonistic social relations between classes and thus requires different theoretical ideas.

Marginalists would like to treat the unequal resource endowments of individuals as due to extra-economic factors, consigning these concerns to the fields of history and sociology. But these inequalities don’t just proceed exchange historically. They are actually reproduced by exchange. Capitalism generates a world in which individuals must maintain a certain standard of living in order to survive (try paying the bills without a phone, house, car, work clothes, haircuts, health-care, etc.) and must engage in wage-labor. And wage-labor actively reproduced the two social classes of capitalist and worker and their violently divergent relationships to the means of production. Without scarcity we couldn’t have wage labor. There would be no reason to work. Thus capitalism must constantly reproduce scarcity.

And this emphasis on the property relations of capitalist mode of production is self evident in the case of colocalization where the structural coercion upon workers deprived of necessities compelled to work is that there is no such coercion universally or independent such particular infrastructure and relations of production.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm
It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies [2], but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of protection at its origin [3] attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so Wakefield’s colonisation theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts of Parliament, attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the Colonies. This he calls “systematic colonisation.”

First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. [4] Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” [5] Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!

For the understanding of the following discoveries of Wakefield, two preliminary remarks: We know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer. But this capitalist soul of theirs is so intimately wedded, in the head of the political economist, to their material substance, that he christens them capital under all circumstances, even when they are its exact opposite. Thus is it with Wakefield. Further: the splitting up of the means of production into the individual property of many independent labourers, working on their own account, he calls equal division of capital. It is with the political economist as with the feudal jurist. The latter stuck on to pure monetary relations the labels supplied by feudal law.

This is the same sort of point where Marx says a black man is a black man but he is only a slave within particular social relations. The same point holds true here, that certain things only exist as a product of social relations and aren't natural and universal properties of things as one might imagine in some of the ideological abstractions about the nature of the system, indifferent to its qualitative distinctions.
#15164002
This is more the face of what a new labor movement looks like. People like Bezos do not understand that humans are social animals. They need meaningful breaks to socialize, etc.; and, not just to relieve biological requirements. Bezos cannot do this to the people working at AWS by contrast. He has to pay top dollar and retention to keep good people. It's interesting that these two extremes exist in the same company.

The traditional Marxist conception is that there is a conflict between MANAGEMENT and LABOR. For upper echelon highly skilled workers, MANAGEMENT struggles to retain them. For lower echelon unskilled workers, MANGAGEMENT struggles to maximize productivity.

The sad part of this is that it's not just a wage issue, but a social one. People sitting in their cars crying before going into work are dealing with the fear of what is to come. $20 per hour doesn't solve that. Slowing down the line and providing a more humane environment does. Of course, a bit more in the wallet helps too.

You'll see this as you get out of school and into the work force. If you go to a well-funded start-up, it's entirely the opposite. You will be shocked at how pampered you'll be. You'll never want to go home. They don't have nap rooms at Amazon warehouses, but they do in Silicon valley firms. They don't have catered lunches with first class food fare at Amazon warehouses, but they do in high tech VC funded startups. They don't have ping-pong tables at Amazon warehouses, but I bet they do where their programmers work.
#15164071
@blackjack21

I expect to have to work very hard as a computer professional. I don't expect ping pong tables or nap rooms. Honestly, I don't believe that is the way it is as an IT professional. There is no such thing as easy money. I'll have to work and earn my pay realistically speaking. I just hope for a decent working environment as far as it not being toxic or bad leadership. But if it is, I'll have to deal with it until something better comes along or until I can transfer out out of it into a better working environment where I can work hard without hindrance and be treated like I am human too. If that's possible. Management is not the entire problem at bad companies. Everything starts with the owner and then trickles down to his or her managers and so on and so forth. But it all starts with the owner first and foremost.

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