Word.ws English Dictionary

wage labor

wage labor noun: labor that is sustained by giving the laborer a wage.

Noun

wage labor (countable and uncountable, plural wage labors)

  1. (US) Labor that is sustained by giving the laborer a wage.
    • The system of wage labor is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labor develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment.1972, Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1st edition, page 24

Forms of wage labor

pluralwage labors
alternative formwage labour

Questions about wage labor

What does wage labor mean?
Wage labor means labor that is sustained by giving the laborer a wage.
What part of speech is wage labor?
Wage labor is a noun.
What is the plural of wage labor?
The plural of wage labor is wage labors.

Words near wage labor in the dictionary

  1. wage credit
  2. wage credits
  3. wage drift
  4. wage earner
  5. wage earners
  6. wage labor
  7. wage laborer
  8. wage laborers
  9. wage labors
  10. wage labour
  11. wage labourer

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wage labor (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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