wage slave

noun

plural wage slaves

: someone who is dependent upon wages to make a living often with little or no opportunity for advancement

… factory owners treated their employees despicably, turning them into underpaid, overworked wage slaves.

—Andrea Widburg

… the overwhelming citizen belief that a rich person could use legal loopholes to end up paying less in taxes than an ordinary wage slave.

—Barry Sussman

After just a few months of being self-employed … she can't imagine ever going back to being a wage slave for someone else.

—Hailey Eber

… no fewer than 15 trucks dish up tasty, cheap lunchtime grub to wage slaves every weekday.

—The Economist

Examples of wage slave in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Proslavery propaganda in the antebellum South insisted that Northern wage slaves were worse off than Southern chattel slaves. —Sarah Churchwell, The New York Review of Books, 11 June 2019

Word History

First Known Use

1846, in the meaning defined above