“The most barbarous fact in all christendom is the labor market. The mere term sufficiently expresses the animalism of commercial civilization.
They who buy and they who sell in the labor market are alike dehumanized by the inhuman traffic in the brains and blood and bones of human beings.”

—  Eugene V. Debs

The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904)

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Eugene V. Debs photo
Eugene V. Debs 108
American labor and political leader 1855–1926

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“Plainly, the most powerful exception to the notion of a voluntary excahnge in a market economy is the labor market.”

Mimi Abramovitz (1941) non-fiction writer

The existence of a market for labor is one of the distinguishing features of a market economy: workers compete to sell their labor at the most favorable price—meaning, in practice, the highest possible wage. At the same time, however, it is clear that the market for labor is qualitatively different from the market for goods, because workers need to sell their labor to survive.
Joel Blau and Mimi Abramovitz, The Dynamics of Social Welfare Policy (Oxford University Press: 2010) p. 68

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