Wage insecurity

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Often appears with: the passions and the emotions · suicide among workers · poverty and wealth · poverty and crime · crime and punishment · atheism

Usually: argument (1) · injustice endured (1) · indignation (1) · lament (1)

Quotable

“Want leaves the working-man the choice between starving slowly, killing himself speedily, or taking what he needs where he finds it--in plain English, stealing.” Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 184 · insight

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 primary

Friedrich Engels · 1844 (as a report/study of conditions; published in Germany 1845)
Act, the Masters' and Servants' Act; and Thomas Duncombe, the representative of the working-men in the House of Commons, was the great man of the session; while the Liberal middle-class with its motion for repealing the Corn Laws, and the Radical middle-class with its resolution for refusing the taxes, played pitiable roles. Even the debates about > act. God knows, there is much room for action nowadays." {32} (57/61)

Engels says poverty and insecurity push workers toward theft, atheism, and suicide, and he portrays wage-living “from hand to mouth” as a demoralizing condition that breeds rebellion or despair.

the reigning class. They become brutes the moment they bend in patience under the yoke, and merely strive to make life endurable while abandoning the effort to break the yoke. This, then, is all that the bourgeoisie has done for the education of the proletariat--and when we take into consideration all the circumstances in which this class lives, we shall not think the worse of it for the resentment which it cherishe…