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

—  Mimi Abramovitz

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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non-fiction writer 1941

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

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