Hammurabi's laws set wages for shipbuilders nearly four thousand years ago
Paying people for their time feels modern, but a Babylonian law code from around 1750 BC already fixed a shipbuilder's fee at 2 shekels per vessel of a given size. Behind every paycheque sits a strange idea the historian Moses Finley spelled out: that labour can be separated from the person doing it and measured by the clock.
A wage is, at root, the price of labour. It differs from a salary, which pays a fixed sum each week or month however many hours are worked, and from commission, which ties pay to individual results. Because wage work is now the dominant form of employment, the word often stretches to cover every kind of pay. Crucially, an employer owes wages whether or not the business turns a profit.
In The Ancient Economy, Finley argued that wage labour rests on two hard conceptual leaps. First, the buyer must treat a worker's labour as a thing apart from both the worker and the product; hiring someone buys labour-power, used on the employer's terms. Second, that abstraction needs a yardstick, which became labour-time. The day was the earliest unit, and as clocks spread, the hour took over, giving rise to the hourly wage.
Wages appear in Egypt's Middle Kingdom, classical Greece and Rome, and much earlier in Mesopotamia. After Sargon of Akkad united Sumer and Assyria around 2334 BC, his grandson Naram-Sin spread common standards of measure, including the shekel. The Code of Hammurabi, from about 1755 to 1750 BC, went on to fix rates for ferries and freight as well as ships. The Hebrew Bible records an early pay grievance: Jacob complains that Laban altered his wages ten times.
Rates today are shaped by supply and demand, unions, laws and custom. In the United States in 2012, about 75 million people, 59 percent of employees, were paid by the hour. Federal law sets a minimum wage, and fourteen states plus various cities set higher ones. Pay gaps persist: in 2007, women earned roughly 80 percent of men's median wage, figures not adjusted for the kind of work done. Research also links higher and more equal public-sector pay to lower corruption.
Source: Wage
