Definition of "wage-work" [wage-work]

• Work done for wages or hire. (noun)

The Century Dictionary (Public Domain)

• "Local labor could not keep up with the “regular celerity” of the process—wage-work was still generally despised, and some capitalists found their new-built factories burned to the ground out of sheer blind hatred."
• "The inferior quality of wage-work, the terrible waste of human energy in modern agricultural and industrial labour, the ever-growing quantity of pleasure-seekers, who shift their burden on to others 'shoulders, the absence of a certain animation in production that is becoming more and more apparent; all this is beginning to preoccupy the economists of the "classical" school."
• "Let us first note the incredible levity with which this objection is raised, without even realizing that the real question raised by this objection is merely to know, on the one hand, whether you effectively obtain by wage-work, the results that are said to be obtained, and, on the other hand, whether voluntary work is not already now more productive than work stimulated by wages."