Not to pick on any one person here, I've seen a lot of posts like this that indicate that there are some very different understandings of what the term wage slave means.



A wage slave isn't a slave in the sense that slaves who performed manual labor, were whipped, chained, starved, and beaten were. They are slaves because they can't survive without the corporation taking care of them. The corps absolutely take care of their wage slaves, they don't beat them down but they sure make sure that they don't get too far ahead either. Different corps will have a different style of how they do it, but a wage slave is there by choice (most of the time). Some employees are replaceable easily, but the more skilled experienced employees are valuable assets. The corps know this and they make sure that they pay the employees enough to keep them happy and loyal, but not so much that they can afford to be idle or go to work for themselves. Additionally the wageslaves are also the consumers the corps vitally need to stay alive, so they can't treat them badly.

Wageslaves are a slave to their paycheck, their benefits, and the higher standard of living that working for the corp provides. The Wageslave doesn't have the capital to strike out on their own. The corp provides housing as part of the compensation package, as well as healthcare and education that would not be available outside the corp and the wageslave is greatful and accepts his pay in Corporate Scrip usable only at the company owned stores in the company owned housing that is safe from the outside world. The corporation encourages the employee to get married and have children, and provides benefits for the emplyees dependents, and now the employee really cannot leave his job because he has a wife and kids to look after and he can't afford to do that but the company benefits are good. The corp rewards the employee for his hard work with vacations and promotions, always being sure that the cost to the company is outweighed by the value of the employee's improved performance and productivity. The corp gives small gifts that help with job performance (that they produce), to the top performers to reward them, and to create an incentive for the rest. Many of those other employees will buy a comparable item from the company just to keep up, so that next year they are the one getting the performance award. Perhaps at some point the employee realizes that the company is taking advantage of him, but it's far too late. He's got virtually no savings because he's trying to live beyond his means and is financing things. He has a company specific skillset that he can't really market somewhere else, and he's got a wife and kids to look after and he can't afford to look after them on a lower paycheck or while he hunts for a new job, and the company owned news media constantly reminds him just how bad it is out there, in the non-corporate world run by criminals and corrupt goverments. So he continues to tell himself that the paycheck is good, and that if he does his best the company will reward him and he'll get ahead.

The corps think in long terms, the owners and the top tiers of the company are the few smart enough and ambitious enough to see the golden cage, escape it and become the jailers themselves. They understand the system and benefit from it, and they do what it takes to keep the cage gilded and the masses below them happy, and convince them that the wall is to keep the other out, not to hold them in. Wageslavery isn't brutal, oppressive, and overt, it's a friendly, soft, gentle, but very deliberately nurtured dependency. It's an addiction to the wages, benefits, and lifestyle of being a corporate employee and the knowledge that you can't do it on your own.

Add to that said Kid that's grown up in the Corporate Culture and that's all they know. There's a generation or two of those now.

If taken away from their "Corporate Family", they'd literally suffer culture shock as bad as being dumped on the street of some foreign country that just happened to speak a similar language to your own.

I mean, hell, look what happened to one Fuchi "Orphan", a BTL'd our wreck who won the Dragon Lottery!

They'll do whatever it takes to keep their employees happy...so long as it doesn't affect the bottomline too much or cut into their overhead.

Most corps have an entire corporate division dedicated to analyzing the costs and benefits of various compensation and benefits packages in terms of actual cost, productivity, morale, training, and replacement. It's the Human Resources division, and good human resource manager are valuable commodities (hint for those GM's who like to run extractions)

The cost to train a new employee, even a rookie right out of college, is enough to discourage abuse. Besides, corps want complacent consumers, not people who are being constantly abused and put down. That's the sort of thing that causes discontent and rebellion. Nope, nice, docile, well treated sheeple is what the Mega's want out of all of us.

The question becomes, is it cheaper to train or install skill wires?

Have you ever been in a situation where you are working in a job that allows you to barely survive by a very thin margin, while at the same time know that you are easily replaceable because there are ten other people wanting your job? I have and it really does put thing in perspective. I lived that life where you had to pay for your own uniform, and was kept on that thin line where I could barely make my Credit Card payments, my rent, power, phone bill, food, and electricity. Unpaid overtime to know that your job was secure? Yeah. Corporations today don't care if you are making below the poverty level and can barely stay afloat. Why should they take care of you? Why is Shadowrun any different? Wage slaves are people who can barely stay afloat, and it is that small paycheck that they receive once a week that keeps them from being on the streets. SR4 is a place where people are walled up into cities in an "Escape from NY (or L.A.)" type of world. This is in Cannon and did anyone help these people out who were stuck in these hell holes? People have it rough, and a corporation might be your one ticket from knowing that you don't have to eat rotten soy products from the dumpster anymore, or wonder if someone is going to shank you in the gutter for your last hit of longhaul.

That is how I look at SR. Now if someone believes that Shadowrun is all smiles and sprinkles. Where corporations look after their lowest of the low level goombas then thats fine. Have at it. I believe the phrase is taken literally not figuratively. Almost as if someone on the street would be talking about it and everyone would laugh nervously knowing that it wasn't very far from the truth.

Neither, you hire the best available. If something better comes along, you fire them and get the new guy. You give them just training needed for what unique to your system. Thats all knowledge skill, everything else you should already have. Knowsofts also don't require skill wires, just a DNI, and we can provide you with a Trode Net for a month and by then you should know it. And since these Knowsofts are specific to our company, we own them, we make them, we copy them. We pay a team of developers for maybe a year to create this, and then we can distribute how and when we want.

Yeah, but you only care about the best guy when they're researchers or top salesmen or the like. Your average slob working in Accounts Payable? Forget it...

You install them Skill Wires, so they can use those skills you gave them to pay for the Skill Wires.

Edit: Wageslave as a term in SR defines for me the inability to leave the corp, be it because they are forced to or because they don't even know it is possible. Basically just as the term is used since the 1960s - the harsher form of what Merriam-Webster define: a person dependent on wages or a salary for a livelihood.

Too true. I only see that sort of situation consuming more people in the Shadowrun future. However, it's also about thin margins of "better" to strive for. At the levels of control that the corps have, they do need to be worried about open rebellion and massive civil unrest.

.... and wouldn't that be a hell of a series of Runs? Destabilizing the revolutionary movement that seeks to bring down the mega's by collapsing everything with maybe/maybe not some sort of plan for what comes after? They really do have the common Joe's best interests at heart, they have a plan, but the plan is rather, harsh, let's say, and risky. But is it better or worse then the way things are now?

The skillwires issue would change the face of the shadowrun labour market. Because it would be difficult to actually 'learn' the skill you are skillwiring, and rating 3 skillwires are the only ones commonly availible, you can churn out endless amounts of 'mediocre' people via skillwires, but never make anyone good.

Of course, given the corporate mentality, they'd actually prefer endless amounts of 'mediocre' people, who they know all perform at Skill Level 3, than one guy who walked in for an interview and claims to have Skill Level 5 in the same task. Even if he does, it's a crapshoot, and gambles are notoriously bad for the bottom line.

Now, the real money is in finding the one guy who is Skill Level 5, who has already demonstrated - despite the world's hostility to him - that he can do it, and then chop him up, slice his brain into wafer-thin segments, and use nanotech to encode a Level 5 Skillsoft from his neural patterns.

But then, I'm a bastard GM like that.

Nah, they cannot install skillwires above 3 on a semi common basis otherwise players could start with them at char gen. Thus skill 5 softs are useles for mass corp drones

But anyway, your mediocre employees thing is wrong. Companies like Deloitte, KPMG, BCG etc don;t make money by employing idiots. They get the best and the brightest.

Anyone with 3 or less in a stat and skill doing labour or trade work is useless in SR4, because its much cheaper to replace them with a drone and have that do the work. Thus the 'medicore employees' model is going to be superseeded by knowledge workers - who do best in the BCG/McKinsey excellence model.

You do make a good point. I personally think there are a few reasons why wage slaves are employed in the first place (as opposed to drones.)

1. If the masses are entertained, working, and have their basic needs met they are less likely to revolt.or cause a fuss.
2. You create good little consumers at the same time that are willing to buy all the crap you create.
3. You create people so dependent on the company that the only thing they see is a "this or death" kind of mentality.

It seems to me that SR is a world where people are put in their place only to not destroy the system that the people in power created. Call it bleak, but I feel that this is more of an unspoken (but real) part of Shadowrun 4th ed.

See, I don';t see it like that. To me, shadowrun has the haves, and the have nots. The haves live in luxury apartments, all have masters degrees and work at high flying consultancy firms or investment banks. Or are accountants and lawyers, but they are the suckers.

The poor people are all the blue collar workers of today, virtually none of whom have jobs.

Aside from jobs like cops, which need actual people, the only jobs for people are ones which require higher educations and creative thought. Everything else is done by drones.

Which neatly explains the barrens - even if they are an 'okay' mechanic, they are still completely useless. Rich people have drones for that. Poor people live in slums.

I think both are fare views of SR. I just see it a different way then I guess.

Wageslave: Anyone who makes a subsistence living at a corporation in a position in which he or she can easily be replaced.

Data Entry Specialist? Wageslave. R&D Scientist? Not a wageslave.

Skillwires can train you up in basic functions, like running a forklift or cash register or speaking Spanish, but thinking creatively or management potential aren't things that can be programmed into a person. With training or cyberware.

Actually social skills like leadership are available for skillwires. Creative thinking might be one of the few qualifications not replaceable. But it should be clear that this isn't really needed and wanted in most positions except certain key positions or research fields.

Real creative leadership or McDonald's-franchise-management leadership? I don't think the first can be taught via skillwire.

Obviously, if you're in a key position or in a research field you're not a wageslave.

This is why I've always looked at SR as a perspective game. We all see the world differently and it's that difference that seperates a Shadowrunner from a corporate lackey. I mean, hell, why would you run if you knew you could get a sweet guard job working for MCT at one of their out-of-the-way plants.

You wouldn't. No one in their right mind would. A Shadowrunner does not adopt the corporate culture of any large corp because they know what is really going on. They see the world for what it is, a bleak and depressive dystopia that keeps normal people in their cages, spinning on their wheels to generate a meager few packets of soy and a place to lay down every night, so they can do it all over again.

Of course, as said here, you need to keep them happy enough to not understand this. And you need to show them that everything out there is evil, cruel, and not what you want. And corporations do this very well with thier corporate culture. Corporations have schools, shopping malls, hospitals, insurance companies...they make you think like they want you to think before you have a chance to know there's anything else out there for you. They are breeding people, more or less, into the perfect herd. Your dad was an accountant, your dad's dad was an accountant, and your dad's dad's dad was an accountant. And frag it all, you're gonna be an accountant too!

This is when a Shadowrunner begins to differ. Instead of seeing all the pretty lights and colors the corps throw at us, we see the streets towered over by the huge corporate offices. Instead of the sounds of happiness and peace, we hear the crying out of people and their emotions as they slowly die from an empty and disposable life.

Once you understand this, you also understand that there's a way out. And it's simple. The only thing you have to risk is your life. And in the end, it's a small price to pay for buying what you want to buy, eating what you want to eat, thinking what you want to think. It's freedom or life in chains. When you figure that out, which one would you like to do?

*looks at his current job, then at what he typed* Huh...I just realised something... *goes off to be a Shadowrunner*

Risking your life is nothing done easily. Sure, it might be worth it. Or it could be better to throw away that stupid idea and go back to your house, your marriage (which you were allowed to enter after 10 years hard work for the corp), your kid(which you were allowed after 12 years of working for the corp) and enjoy the pleasures of guilt-free consumption (of - you guessed it - corp products).

Freedom and possible starvation...

Or slavery and fat of the land.

It is a rough decision that is not to be taken lightly.

Edgar Friendly: "You see, according to Cocteau's plan I'm the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I WANT high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-o all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener"."
- Demolition Man

Yeah, that is about it, isn't it...

Oh, Denis Leary... you riff Bill Hicks so well.

threads like these keeps reminding me of a webpage i ones read where workers at a burger franchise was equiped with radio headsets that a computer used to direct the specific actions taken for any job in the place.

i just cant seem to dig that page up tho

Actually, Skillwires are only needed for Active skills, not for Knowledge or Language skills.

Where does it say that? I thought skill wires go up to r5 because knowledge softs and language softs go up to r5 as well. I could be wrong, but then how the hell to you use knowledge or language softs?

DNI is all thats required.

While this is true, but I think its worth mentioning that skillwires can also train you to be a pretty damn good fighter pilot. a FIGHTER PILOT. This takes YEARS to teach people in normal circumstances.

However, yup, creative thought is impossible by definition.

Skillwires allow you to fly a plane. It takes much more than flying ability to make a 'fighter pilot'.

Yeah, your right, you need some more stuff, like a 'fighter tactics' knowsoft and a gunnery skillsoft as well. Heck they can probably jam in another R4 active skillsoft if it's R6 wires.

Start with an Ork and your virtually assured of reasonable G-tolerance, not that you need that because you pilot the vehicle remotely via a simrig

If one of your characters had

Gunnery 4
Pilot: Aircraft 4
Knowledge: Tactics: Aircombat 5
Knowledge: Tactics: Air to Ground combat 5
Knowledge: Tactics: AA evasion 5

You'd say, 'okay he's probably not a bad fighter pilot' - but I can literally buy all that stuff.

Incidently, I'm seriously debating banning knowsofts from my game.

Knowsofts don't bother me nearly as much as Skillwires. I rarely allow Skillwires in my games, and strangely enough, few players actually make extensive use of knowsofts. Linguasofts see a fair amount of use though.

Yeah, I agree, skillwires are game breaking busted. I think the only logical fix is to make sure that each activesoft has to be individually tailored, but even then it feels totally unfair. I don't like anything that can let a character act without bringing his own skills to bare, with an exception for drones.

My current face to face team doesn't have any skillwires due to some 'gentle suggestions' in character generation, plus I use frank's rules for char gen which removes some of the incentives to use the things so I'm debating deleting them both entirely.

The thing is, Activesofts won't allow for any originality. They do the same manouvers at the same situations every time.

There's no learning curve, and, if faced with a situation they don't know how to deal with, you're screwed.

Sure, you can chip Karate v4.2, but when faced with "Man That Fights Like Wolf", you're SOL, there's not Katas for that.

By the by, be really interesting to see what Wolf and Raven are doing in 2070...

Whereas a basic fighter pilot (one of the elite, just from the selection competition) will have at *least*
Gunnery (Aircraft weapons) 4(6)
Pilot: Aircraft (Fast Jet) 4(6)
Awareness (Air combat) 4(6)
K: Tactics - Air combat (Dogfighting) 5(7)
K: Tactics - Air to Ground combat (bombs) 5(7)
K: Tactics - AA evasion (passive countermeasures) 5(7)

And have 2 DP more, the potential for getting to 6(, the potential for reflex recorders and other additional 'ware and can burn Edge (I reckon fighter Pilots are Shadowrunner-class opposition and should have Edge). My books are on loan so I can't check: how much is Skillwires 4, 3 datajacks and all those 'softs? The skillsoft route might be appropriate if you've got a fast rate of production of airframes, but those fast-movers, all they do is train...

There used to be a rule that you couldn't *learn* anything off an ActiveSoft; has SR4 excised that?

Skillwires *are* great for producing Grunts and for having a versatile "workforce" but not for specialist jobs.

I still don't see why Corps would put skill wires in anyone, that wasn't already fully invested in the corporation for 10 or more years.

SR4 hasn't done away with colleges, and schools... Why would we hire a hobo, and outfit him with SOTA equipment and have him do our stuff, when we can hire Graduate from Seattle University who will be paying off student loans for the next 20 years (That's what makes a wageslave), and have all the necessary skills and knowledges at no cost from us other than his paycheck?

We just give him the knowsoft (Corporate Handbook), and then loan him the linguasofts if he has to deal with clients in other languages or regions.

I'd only put skillwires in someone who I knew was loyal to the corp, had been there for a long period of time, and I didn't want to wait for him to finish extra courses to get the necessary training, likely VP's and Heads of Operations. Putting them in every data monkey on the job is a bad investment.

Right. Sorry. I meant 'softs in general.

Actually, R&D Scientists are more wageslave than Data Entry Specialists are.

One thing that people tend to overlook is that in the Sixth World specific performance is a valid remedy to the breach of a labor contract.

Right now, it isn't in the majority of the world because of the jurisprudence that has risen since the outlawing of slavery. No one can be legally forced to so work. If you sign a contract to do a job and then decide not to do it, there is fuck-all your employer can do about it unless the contract had penalty clauses. Generally, the worst that could happen is that you'd have to compensate the employer for lost time while he searched for another person to do the job and that compensation is limited by reasonableness. In the Sixth World, this isn't so.

In the Sixth World, if you signed a labor contract with an extraterritorial corporation then that corporation quite literally owns you, though they would use softer semantics. If you have a labor contract and you want to leave then you must get the corporation to release you from the contract.

If you are an easily-replaceable data-entry specialist then this should be no problem. You give your notice and that's that. The corporation hasn't invested much into you and they don't expect to get anything out of you that they can't get from anyone else. If you are a top-tier research scientist who is making your corporation billions, on the other hand, there is simply no way in hell. You'd almost certainly be required to compensate them for losses they will suffer due to your departure, which would be the projected future value of your work, which would be billions. And your contract almost certainly has a clause which requires you to give their reasonable employment offers preferential treatment, within reason, essentially allowing them to unilaterally renew your contract so long as they don't go totally batshit insane and offer you a pittance.

If you do decide to violate your employment contract and run away from extraterritorial property then the police will be after you and you will never again be able to rear your head or use your SIN in a reputable establishment lest you be arrested and put to trial before a Contract Court which will extradite you back to your corporation which will punish you for your transgression and increase security around you so that such escape is not possible again. The only way you can be sure that you're safe is to make a deal with another extraterritorial corporation to illegally hide you in exchange for your labor. If you go through with this then you are basically the prisoner of another big corporation, but your cage now might be significantly more gilded than your current one and the atmosphere may better suit your style.
Of course, if you do this, then your currently employer will hire shadowrunners to kill you or just do it themselves because the only thing worse than losing the value of your labor is losing it to a competitor. Make no mistake, if your death is more profitable to them than your continued existence, which is the case of researchers who won't play ball and who are switching teams, they then will kill you.

The nature of corporate employment is such that the expendable people on the bottom rungs have substantially more freedom than those who are making a comfortable living in the middle. Those who have talent but no authority or who have authority but no but no real power are the most vulnerable. Even those who are at the very top are more limited in what they can do than those who are at the very bottom because of the cutthroat nature of the megacorporate power system. Even CEOs can get geeked if their immediate inferiors seem them as liabilities and high level executives who jump ship tend to be the targets of reprisals.

There is, in fact, a reason why voluntary extractions happen. Data Entry Specialists don't spend good money to have themselves kidnapped by shadowrunners. Researchers and executives do.

Well said. I meant that wage slaves are basically slaves to their wages. I mean yes they can quit. They totally have the freedom to stop working for a corp, and eventually live on the street and starve to death.

Personally I think why you would kill a top tier defecting researcher, is for what he knows at that very moment. He was probably working on something that they don't want their competitors to know or gain an edge on. That man or woman can take their work with them, and that is what corporations don't want. They loose billions and the other crop gains billions. Also the reason why a researcher hires someone to kidnap them is so that if they ever get extracted back to their company they can just say that they were forced to work for them. Less death for the researcher, which is certainly a plus.

I agree with what you said except for:

Actually, R&D Scientists are more wageslave than Data Entry Specialists are.

No, R&D Scientists are slaves to the corp whereas the Data Entry Specialist can be easily replaced and is, hence, a slave to his wages. Wageslave.

Agree with everything else though.

I must admit that to me "wageslave" has always simply been a nickname for "corp employee"...

Me too. I never really needed to read any more into it than that, as every corporation, and indeed every division within every corporation will treat their employees differently. I don't think there's a general overall trend by the big corporations to crush the souls of the people that work for them, but there is certainly areas within that structure that do that very thing.

"while i may be living hand to mouth day by day, at least i still have my freedom. unlike those employees of the corps, that have sold their freedom for a stable paycheck. slaves to their wage, thats what they are!"

and this i think is a theme that one can possibly trace back to the 80's. with foreign interests buying up us corp again and again, one could possibly see it as usa giving up its mythical freedom...

Still happening in Canada, Chummer.

It seems such a waste of time;
If that's what it's all about,
Moma if that's moving up,
then I'm moving out!

that may be, but im not sure canada has the same kind of mythological attachment to "freedom"...

*Sighs* There aren't many Canadian patriots left, that is true... I feel alone in that.

And now back to Wageslaves and away from the Whiny Canuck.

Surely all the talk of workers, wageslaves, etc depends on the job involved ??

With the computing power available, and pseudo intelligent programming, why would there be many admin/desk based jobs at all ??

There are already indentured staff - poorly paid immigrants hoping to make abetter life, forced to work for virtually no money and unable to leave because they don't speak the language or are illegals or their families are threatened with violence.

[A recent article I was reading talked about the near-indentured servitude of IT staff in the US, hired for IT work and access to the working visa, then treated badly in the knowledge they can't complain and will be deported if they quit]

Some companies already use convicted prisoners as very cheap manual labour.

I remember reading an old Chill RPG story about a chap who broke into a company, only to find all the data entry staff were zombies.