Perks, pilferage, and the fiddle: The historical structure of invisible wages

Conclusion

History lives on. The perpetual and perpetuating myth of the present is to believe that we -are liberated from the anguish of the past. On the contrary, the greatest source of history is impregnated in the mundane and everyday world of the present. The meaning of the world of work, for example, is revealed in its relationship to its past. Workers are not only, on the whole, paid as a class,¹ those situated at structurally disadvantaged parts receive large segments of their wages “invisibly” - as tips or fiddles from customers, or pilferage and perks from employers. The crucial common factor in these forms of “invisible wages” is the added power which accrues to employers through their establishment. They are meaningfully located, however, not simply as archaic relics in the gradual rational liberation of the present from the feudal bond, but as forms of domination crucial to the persistence and growth of modern capitalism because of their solution to those disciplinary problems not soluble in money alone.