Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

The payment of a monthly rather than a daily wage was a revolutionary innovation that gradually took hold in all the developed countries during the twentieth century. This innovation was inscribed in law and became a feature of wage negotiations between workers and employers. The daily wage, which had been the norm in the nineteenth century, gradually disappeared. This was a crucial step in the constitution of the working class: workers now enjoyed a legal status and received a stable, predictable remuneration for their work. This clearly distinguished them from day laborers and piece workers—the typical employees of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.