Subsistence, understood as enough to keep the laborers alive and enable the working class to just keep up its numbers, is the natural and generally the actual wage of labor.
A trace more when the labor is scarce, relative to demand, enabling larger families among laborers which then remove the scarcity of labor.
A trace less when labor is too abundant, forcing workers to have families so small the number of workers contracts.
In the face of this, of course, productivity gains in the economy as a whole go to increasing the opulence of the upper classes.
The controlling factor on family size is understood to be shockingly high infant mortality, often largely attributable to starvation.
He well understands the relevance of immigration policy as well as protective trade policy.
Apart from relative scarcity of labor, the only thing pushing wages higher than subsistence is legal interference or unionization.
Smith is well aware of the horrendous inequality of the bargaining position between individual employers and individual laborers, and claims there is anyway nearly always tacit or express collusion among employers to hold down wages.
He observes that the law generally forbids or undermines or makes as ineffective as possible any collective action among workers to push up wages, but not collusion among employers to hold them down.
Reading Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.
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