Wage Labour
Wage labour (or wage labor) is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labour under a formal or informal employment contract. These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages are market determined. In exchange for the wages paid, the work product generally becomes the undifferentiated property of the employer, except for special cases such as the vesting of intellectual property patents in the United States where patent rights are usually vested in the original personal inventor. A wage labourer is a person whose primary means of income is from the selling of his or her labour in this way.
In modern mixed economies such as that of the OECD countries, it is currently the dominant form of work arrangement. Although most work occurs following this structure, the wage work arrangements of CEOs, professional employees, and professional contract workers are sometimes conflated with class assignments, so that "wage labour" is considered to apply only to unskilled, semi-skilled or manual labour.
Read more about this topic: Employment
Famous quotes containing the words wage and/or labour:
“My home policy: I wage war; my foreign policy: I wage war. All the time I wage war.”
—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)