The status of wage labor was made more problematic in the United States by its entanglement with the question of slavery. Slavery complicated the issue of wage labor during the nineteenth century because of apparent similarities in their underlying logics. Both arrangements involved, to varying degrees and in diferent ways, coercion and the sale of labor. Lawrence Glickman (1997, p. 157), summing up a generation of research by labor historians, concludes that “most antebellum workers placed wage labor with slavery along a continuum of bondage.” Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century, a very common way to condemn wage labor was to refer to it as “wage slavery.” The association of wage labor and slavery was not just a rhetorical ploy but a central animating idea in the labor movement, both in the United States and elsewhere.12 The call to reduce hours in the postbellum period, for instance, was very much couched in the language of emancipation, reminiscent of the rhetoric used in the campaign against slavery. Ira Steward, eulogized on his death by American Federation of Labor leaders as “the most important American contributor to labor thought,” saw the fight for shorter hours as entirely continuous with the abolitionist cause (Roediger 1986).
The question of the legitimacy of wage labor thus turned to a significant extent on the degree to which it was viewed as being diferent in kind from slavery. Stanley (1998, p. 88) sums up the debate about the relation between slavery and wage labor as follows: “The crux of the disagreement concerned the meaning of emancipating all men to sell their own labor—whether this transformation established self-ownership or self-dispossession, contract freedom or wage slavery.” The answer to that question, in turn, depended on whether labor could be reasonably construed as an alienable commodity, just like any other: “The legitimacy of commerce lay in the legal equality of employers and workers and the likeness of labor to other commodities” (p. 76). As long as wage labor was conceived of as diferent in kind from the commodities aforded by the wage, it remained overshadowed by the question of whether it could, even in theory, be fairly compensated. For how can inalienable life activity be in any sense fairly exchanged for a wage and the lifeless things it commands? This question threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the wage-labor exchange.
Economic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background
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