Unpaid

Why work doesn’t pay

Unpaid upends conventional wisdom about how we value work, exposing wage theft as one of capitalism’s enduring open secrets. From unpaid overtime and under-the-table jobs to algorithmic exploitation, there are as many ways to steal wages as there are to pay them. But what if wage theft isn’t a bug but a feature of capitalism itself?

Across the world, millions of workers exhaust themselves in billions of hours of free labour. As app-based gig work becomes increasingly common, ex­ploitation grows more sophisticated and harder to detect.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Blending personal stories with a fresh, accessible take, Unpaid traces the long history of wage theft and reveals how employers continue to get away with it. Matthew Cole shows that wage theft is not just about broken laws but about the nature of property itself. He makes a powerful case for our collective right to reassert our labour-power.Preface
Introduction: A Fair Day’s Wage
1– The State of Wage Theft
2– Technoligarchy
3– Lineages of Unpaid Labour
4– Property is Still Theft
5– The Commodification of Labour and its Limits
6– Rethinking Wage Theft
7– Another Work is Possible
Conclusion: Expropriating the Future"A searing and revelatory unmasking of the despicable reality of modern capitalism. Few books are able to make complex ideas so accessible – yet this is one of them"
—Owen Jones

"Passionately political. A vital read for anyone who works for a living"
—Gavin Mueller, author of Breaking Things at Work

"An absolutely essential guide to capitalist class relations. Unpaid unflinchingly catalogues the reality of labour exploitation under capitalism, presenting Marx's most important ideas in a clear, succinct and compelling way"
—Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism

"The future is being stolen from us, day by day. The glorious technological future we are constantly being told is imminent is in fact, Matt Cole reminds us, built with unpaid labor. In this deeply researched and meticulously argued book, Cole provides a sharpened blade with which to take on the techno-oligarchs (and ordinary bad bosses, too)"
—Sarah Jaffe, author of From the Ashes and Work Won’t Love You BackDr. Matthew Cole is a Lecturer on Technology, Work and Employment at the University of Sussex, researching wage theft and technological change. He is an Associate Fellow of the Oxford internet Institute working on the Fairwork Project and the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit). His work has been published in Tribune, Novara, Vice, OpenDemocracy, The Independent, Salvage, and in various academic journals.