piecework

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piecework

piecework, work for which the laborer is paid on the basis of the amount of work done. The system is best adapted to standardized operations in which quantity is preferred to quality. Its advocates maintain that it pays the worker according to his ability. Its opponents argue that it tends to pay the best worker what he would receive on a time basis, while other workers receive less than they would by the hour and that it forces the pace of work. In the United States the 1949 amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act in effect required that pieceworkers be paid at least the minimum wage.

piecework

[′pēs‚wərk]

(industrial engineering)

Work paid for in accordance with the amount done rather than the hours taken.

piecework

work paid for according to the quantity produced

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

References in periodicals archive ?

The experiences of these women pieceworker differ widely in the social context, local opportunity structures and individual life course.

Piecework at a Glance: Factors Affecting Home Based Women's Entrepreneurial Productivity: A Case Study of Katlong District Mardan

Mr Bond said the increase for pieceworkers amounted to nearly 35% and would rise again next April when they would be entitled to 120% of NMW.

Minimum wage warning

Artists should not be pieceworkers, occasional visitors to their theatres.

Art will out: can we put the art back in our arts institutions?

Employers will be obliged to issue a statement to employees on the minimum wage, detailing specific arrangements for pieceworkers and homeworkers.

Jobs under threat from minimum wage

The act only applies to an employer-employee relationship; however, it contains an exceedingly broad definition of the term "employ." According to this definition, virtually all workers - including pieceworkers, workers hired on a contract-payment basis, homeworkers and members of a cooperative - are all employees.

Personnel audit

Homeworkers appear briefly in this history, usually as pieceworkers in the garment trades, but homework as a phenomenon has escaped analysis.

Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States

On the other hand, a large-scale formal sector enterprise may hire pieceworkers to assemble goods--for example, toys, radio transmitters, or batteries--in their homes.

Employment and unemployment in Mexico's labor force

Young lawyers are often treated and made to feel like pieceworkers.

Stewardship

These uprisings which were largely revolts of disgruntled artisans, pieceworkers in the textile trade and peasants often took the air of millinery or chiliastic movements.

The Egyptian and Iranian ulama at the threshold of modern social change: what does and what does not account for the difference?

Thus, he classifies the carpenters and painters as labor aristocrats, even though only one-quarter were skilled craftsmen, while three-quarters of these workers were sweated pieceworkers employed under the subcontracting system.

Urban Revolt: Ethnic Politics in the Nineteenth-Century Chicago Labor Movement

Annual income tops out at around $25,000, and many of the more financially successful pieceworkers supplement their journalism incomes with technical, public relations or advertising writing.

You just keep me hanging on: stringers

In the cities, it was common for children under 12 to work long hours for $2 to $5 a week as factory pieceworkers, messengers, janitors, "tail-end" boys on wagons, and stock boys in stores.