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Many of the methods by which socioeconomically advantaged people have maintained a supply of cheap labour over the centuries are now either defunct or greatly curtailed. As discussed and linked earlier, these include peasantry, serfdom, slavery, indentured servitude, wage slavery, or domestic servitude. But motives to get labour cheaply still remain (and always will). Today, although businesses can no longer get away with using (for example) de jure slavery, economic competition ensures that they will always try to buy labour at the lowest possible cost or to obviate it entirely (through mechanisation and automation). Various present-day methods of ensuring lowest cost exist, as detailed below. The first and most basic method is the domestic labour market within one country (or region thereof), in which workers compete with each other for jobs. Within this market, further market segmentation is possible. Businesses try to avoid overtime (when practical). They often try to avoid employing full-time employees (FTEs) in favor of part-time employees (PTEs) or contingent workers (for example, temporary workers, freelancers, cottage workers, contractors (who may have subcontractors), or day labourers), all of which usually entail less obligation for employee benefits (compensation beyond the wages themselves). Agencies tasked with enforcing labour law are supposed to be perennially on guard against the avidity with which employers find clever ways to make people function like FTEs but carry nominal labels as contractors, freelancers, or PTEs (e.g., dishonest worker classification, unpaid overtime). Other avenues of discount labour are the institutions of apprenticeship and cooperative education (including work-study programs), and (relatedly) the informal tradition of the "broke college student who works for peanuts". Here, the low wages are often credibly justified by the inexperience and incomplete training of the worker; but it is also true that such forms of employment always have at least some potential to be "milked dry" by those with the upper hand. For example, there has been a long history of 3rd- through 7th-year apprentices performing valuable, competent work at sub-journeyman rates. 1894 illustration of chain gang performing manual labor The domestic labour market may also extend beyond "normal" workers to various kinds of employing prisoners (e.g., penal labour, work release). Even military employment, most especially by conscription or other mandatory national service, is a means of employing labour at lowest cost (compared to costlier alternatives such as all-volunteer militaries). The next step beyond domestic labour markets (within countries) is the global labour market (between countries), in which all workers on Earth compete with each other, albeit via imperfect competition. Differences between regions and countries in standard of living and (relatedly) prevailing wage rates provide a perennial incentive for businesses to send manual tasks to remote workers (via offshoring) or to bring remote workers to the manual tasks (via immigration of foreign workers, whether illegal [undocumented workers] or legal [guest-worker programs codified with work permits). The nature of the work determines its relative degree of geographical transferability; for example, manual assembly work in factories can usually be offshored, whereas tillage and harvesting are anchored to the location of the crop fields. One characteristic of offshoring and worker migration that is especially useful to businesses is that they can provide employers with (fuzzy-boundaried) subpopulations of inexpensive workers without resorting to biological-inheritance-based rationalisations (such as racial slavery, feudalism and aristocracy, or caste-based division of labour). Modern businesses in the global economy are quick to point out that they respect the humanity of their offshore or immigrant workers every bit as much as that of their developed-economy-native workers (which may not be that much, in reality, but is equal, and is pretended to be substantial). Penal labour is an intersection of the low skill/low social class idea (serfs, slaves, wage slaves) and the class-neutral labour-cost reduction idea (offshoring, foreign workers, contingent workers). Like offshoring and guest worker programs, penal labour is an opportunity for businesses to get cheap manual labour without denying the humanity of the workers—and in some cases even seeming civically responsible ("providing second chances to live right and work honestly"). Thus socioeconomic systems, regardless of their capitalist, socialist, or syncretised ideological bases, need to remain vigilant that they resist any tendency toward the overimprisonment of workers, because it could align with the financial interests of businesses, government, or both, stoking the same human mechanisms of specious rationalisation that justified slavery or wage slavery. Military enlistment (whether conscription, other mandatory service, or volunteer service) shares some similarities with penal labour when viewed from this perspective, in that it may synergistically provide (1) discount labour for a government or its contractors at the same time that it also provides (2) opportunities to the workers or soldiers themselves (for example, more job security, better-quality health insurance, better-quality retirement-savings plans, and/or more educational opportunities [most especially technical training, but sometimes also broader university education as well]). These many benefits cannot accurately be pigeon-holed as all good or all bad. They are inevitably double-edged blades, and must be dynamically managed and monitored to keep them from leaving the healthy range of the spectrum and moving into pathological ranges. For that to succeed, there must also exist some decent level of employment opportunity, compensation, and psychological security in the private sector, especially non–defense community businesses. Paramilitary, police, and corrections (prison guard) service are other segments of employment that reflect the traits of military service in this respect. |
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