The Wager

To earn, we feel, is to deserve, and to deserve is very nearly to possess: the wage we have earned seems already ours, withheld only by the accident of payday. The word will not support the feeling. Wage entered English around 1300 from the Norman French wage, a northern variant of gage — a pledge, a security, a stake thrown down. It is the very same word as wager, and a near cousin of wed, which once meant to bind oneself by a pledge or a gift of earnest money, and of mortgage, the ‘dead pledge’ of the lawyers. A wage, in the grain of the word, is not a payment but a pledge — something staked against a performance still to come.

Older still, and plainer, is the word the language threw away. Before English borrowed the French term, its own word for a workman’s hire was lean — the same word, and at root the same thing, as loan.¹1Wage < Anglo-Norman and Old North French wage (Old French gage) ‘pledge, pay,’ from Frankish *wadi- ‘pledge’; a doublet of gage, cognate with wed (Old English weddian, to pledge or betroth) and with mortgage, ‘dead pledge.’ The older native English word for wages was lean, related to loan. (OED; Online Etymology Dictionary.) The two senses had not yet parted: to be paid for one’s labour and to make a loan were once spoken in a single breath, because at bottom they were a single act. The wage was a loan the worker made, and hoped to have returned. We kept the word for the lending, and forgot it had ever meant a wage — but the thing it named has not changed in the least.

The pledge in the word was once a pledge in the hand. When a servant was hired in medieval England the bargain was sealed not by a signature but by a coin: the earnest penny, the arles, the ‘God’s penny’ — a token pressed into the new servant’s palm to bind him to the work. Once he had taken the earnest he was bound to appear on the appointed day; the coin was not his wages but the pledge of them, the little stake that made the larger promise real.²2The earnest penny — also arles, or ‘God’s penny’ (Latin Argentum Dei) — a coin or token given to bind a bargain, ‘notably for the hiring of a servant’; the same gesture as the soldier’s ‘King’s shilling.’ At the hiring (or ‘mop’) fairs, held from the fourteenth century, servants were engaged by the year and their wages paid at its end. The same gesture enlisted a soldier, who ‘took the King’s shilling’ and was from that moment the King’s man.

And the wages themselves came after — long after. At the hiring fairs that ran from the fourteenth century into the nineteenth, labourers stood in the market wearing the badges of their trade — a shepherd’s twist of wool, a milkmaid’s pail — and were hired by the year. Board and lodging they had as they went; but their wages were paid at the end of the year’s service, in a lump, when the work was already done. A man gave a year of his life on the strength of a shilling and a promise. The pledge bound him at the start; the payment, if it came, came at the close; and between the two lay the long unpaid middle, the part the worker advanced on trust.

This is the strange asymmetry at the heart of the wage, and it shows most clearly by contrast. When you buy a loaf, you and the baker exchange in the same instant: the bread crosses the counter as the coin does, and neither of you need trust the other longer than a moment. The wage bargain is nothing like this. The worker delivers first — an hour, a day, a week, a year of labour — and is paid afterward, in arrears, once the period he has already worked is over. For the whole of that period he has given value and received nothing but a promise. He is, in the plainest sense, a lender: he advances his labour to his employer and waits to be repaid.³3In an ordinary sale, payment and delivery are simultaneous. The wage contract is almost unique in requiring one party — the worker — to perform in full before the other pays. Wages paid after the work are said, tellingly, to be paid ‘in arrears.’

No one calls it lending, because the loan is invisible, uncounted, and bears no interest, and because the worker has no choice but to make it. But a loan it is. Every Friday’s pay clears a debt the worker ran up from Monday; and the following Monday he begins to run it up again. The balance is never in his favour and never settled for long: he is permanently his employer’s creditor, by an amount equal to all the work he has done since he was last paid. The wage does not precede the labour, the way a price precedes a purchase. It follows the labour, always a step behind it.

He does not earn his wage and then collect it. He lends his labour, and waits.

To be a creditor is to bear a risk, and the worker bears his with almost no protection. For most of industrial history the first risk was that he would not be paid in money at all. Under the truck system the millowner and the mineowner paid in tokens or scrip, redeemable only at the company’s own shop — the ‘tommy shop’ — where the prices were set by the very hand that paid the wage; the worker’s labour came back to him as overpriced goods, or as credit in a ledger he could not check. It took a century of legislation — in Britain the Truck Acts, the first of them in 1831, which required that wages be paid in ‘the current coin of the realm’ — merely to establish that a wage must be paid in money the employer did not himself control.⁴4The truck system — payment in scrip or goods redeemable at the company store (the ‘tommy shop’; in Mexico, the tienda de raya). The Truck Act 1831 required payment in ‘the current coin of the realm’; its protections were extended to nearly all manual workers in 1887.

The deeper risk was, and remains, that the employer cannot pay, or will not. When a firm fails, the workers who have already done the week’s or the month’s work do not stand first in the queue; they line up as creditors among the others, claimants upon an estate that may have nothing left for them — having lent their labour to a debtor now insolvent. The merchant who sells a company its coal is owed a debt and knows it, and secures himself accordingly. The worker who sells it his labour is owed a debt too, but is rarely told so, and almost never secured. He has extended credit without being told he was a lender, and learns it only when the credit goes unpaid.

Because the worker performs first, the simplest way to cheat him is the oldest: take the work and withhold the pay. We have a flat little phrase for it now — wage theft — and measured in money it is among the largest thefts in the country. When employers shave hours, deny overtime, pocket tips, or simply never send the final cheque, they are taking from people who have already done the work and cannot take it back. The Economic Policy Institute reckons that the wages recovered for victims in a single recent year came to roughly three times everything taken in all the robberies reported that year; the true total, most of it never recovered, runs into the tens of billions.⁵5Economic Policy Institute estimates of wage theft — unpaid overtime, off-the-clock work, stolen tips, misclassification, withheld final pay. Sums recovered in 2012 (about $933 million) ran near three times all reported U.S. robberies; fuller estimates reach the tens of billions a year.

And where the law has made the plain theft harder, the advance has instead been turned into a market. A young industry now offers to lend the worker his own earned-but-unpaid wages, a few days early, for a fee — ‘earned wage access,’ it is called, as though reaching what one has already earned were a service one might be sold. The worker’s standing loan to his employer, the invisible credit at the centre of the wage, has at last been noticed by finance — not in order to abolish it, but in order to charge him for it. He pays, now, to borrow back his own labour.

The man with a gun takes your wallet. The employer takes the week you cannot un-work.

So we come back to the word, which was right all along. A wage is a wager. The worker stakes his labour — hours of a life he cannot have again — on the promise of a payment he can collect only once the labour is spent; and, like any bettor, he may find when he comes to collect that the house is empty or the game was rigged. The much-praised freedom of free labour, the freedom to sell one’s work to whom one will, holds inside it a freedom less often praised: the freedom to be cheated by the one you worked for, and to stand in the queue of creditors when he fails. The medieval serf was bound, and protected; the modern worker is free, and exposed. He is paid, when he is paid, for a trust he was never told he had extended.

Plate i found in the wage a measure of value, and asked whether it could be just. Plate ii found in it a measure of time, and watched the clock that made the hour saleable. This plate finds a third thing in it, plainer and more human than either: a measure of trust — and the trust, unlike the value and the time, is furnished wholly by the weaker party. A wage is the price of the work, reckoned in money and paid in time; but before it is any of that, it is a promise — made by the strong to the weak — that the work already done will be paid for. Every payday is that promise kept. The long argument over the wage is, at the last, an argument about a debt: who owes it, who carries its risk, and what is owed to the one who, the work being finished, must wait.