Unfree labor
Unfree labour (or unfree labor in American English) is a generic or collective term for those work relations, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will by the threat of destitution, detention, violence (including death), or other extreme hardship to themselves, or to members of their families. Many of these forms of work may be covered by the term forced labour, although the latter term tends to imply forms based on violence. Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery, and related institutions (e.g. debt slavery, serfdom, and labor camps).
Payment for unfree labour
If payment occurs, it may be in one or more of the following forms:
- The payment does not exceed subsistence or barely exceeds it;
- The payment is in goods which are not desirable and/or cannot be exchanged or are difficult to exchange; or
- The payment wholly or mostly consists of cancellation of a debt or liability that was itself coerced or belongs to someone else.
Unfree labour is often more easily instituted and enforced on migrant workers, who have traveled far from their homelands and who are easily identified because of their physical, ethnic, linguistic, or cultural differences from the general population since they are unable or unlikely to report their conditions to the authorities.
According to the labour theory of value (as used by classical economists), under capitalism, workers never keep all of the wealth they create, as some of it goes to the profit of capitalists. By contrast, according to the subjective theory of value (as used by neoclassical economists), the wages offered necessarily represent the marginal wealth generated by the labour, and any profit (or loss) is due to other inputs provided, such as arbitrage, time value of money, or risk. It is argued by supporters of certain theories of distributive justice that any occasion on which a worker is able to turn down employment and look elsewhere is "free labour".
Chat rooms • What links here • Copyright info • Contact information • Category:Root