Wage slavery is a term used to criticize exploitation of labor by business, by keeping wages low or stagnant in order to maximize profits. The situation of wage slavery can be loosely defined as a person's dependence on wages for their livelihood, especially when wages are low, treatment and conditions are poor, and there are few chances of upward mobility.
Salary protest in the United Kingdom
Emma Goldman denounced wage slavery by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves".
African American wage workers picking cotton on a plantation in the South
Adam Smith
A sweatshop or sweat factory is a crowded workplace with very poor or illegal working conditions. The manual workers are poorly paid, work long hours, and experience poor working conditions. Some illegal working conditions include poor ventilation, little to no breaks, inadequate work space, insufficient lighting, or uncomfortably/dangerously high or low temperatures. The work may be difficult, tiresome, dangerous, climatically challenging, or underpaid. Workers in sweatshops may work long hours with unfair wages, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage; child labor laws may also be violated. Women make up 85 to 90% of sweatshop workers and may be forced by employers to take birth control and routine pregnancy tests to avoid supporting maternity leave or providing health benefits.
A sweatshop in the United States c. 1890
A sweatshop in a New York tenement building, c. 1889
Lewis Hine noted poor working conditions when he photographed workers at the Western Dress Factory in Millville, New Jersey, for the WPA's National Research Project (1937)
