Dealing with Workers

The question of a just wage has presumably been contentious ever since there have been wage relations, and philosophical thought on the subject reaches back hundreds of years. Yet the subject remains elusive. This chapter discusses wage payments through the lens of trade justice. It explains how questions about wages arise as a topic of trade justice to begin with, examines prominent ways of thinking about wages, and offers an exploitation-based perspective. While none of the prominent competing perspectives fully succeeds, they capture insights a convincing perspective should accommodate. Deploying the conception of exploitation as power-induced failure of reciprocity shows how certain wages might plausibly be criticized as exploitatively low.