For much of the 20th century, citizenship in Europe and postcolonial states was organised around an institutional articulation between labour and the state.
The expansion of social rights rested on an assumption embedded in welfare systems and collective bargaining arrangements: that waged employment established one’s recognised place within society. The wage functioned not only as income but as the basis for claiming pensions, healthcare, unemployment insurance and other protections.
For Etienne Balibar, this settlement gave material form to the idea that equality and freedom are constituted together through institutions rather than declared as abstract ideals, since access to pensions, healthcare and income protection depended on participation in wage labour. The worker emerged as the figure through which rights could be extended, not because all were workers in fact, but because labour operated as the shared reference through which claims became intelligible and generalisable.
From the late 1970s onward, the decline of stable employment disrupts that shared reference without eliminating the need for an institutional ground through which equality and freedom can be organised. Deindustrialisation, subcontracting, labour flexibilisation and the global reorganisation of production weakened long-term contracts and expanded precarious forms of work. Income is now assembled across temporary contracts, subcontracted labour, informal work, remittances and public transfers and these sources do not consolidate into a common position that anchors standing in the same way.
The wage no longer provides a basis for extending claims to pensions, healthcare, unemployment protection and housing security broadly. Those who derive their income primarily from property, finance or rents were never dependent on wages in this way, and the widening gap between returns to assets and returns to labour underscores that the wage no longer functions as a shared institutional reference.
As financialised circulation expands in advanced capitalist economies and increasingly in parts of the Global South, citizenship is reorganised through infrastructures that tie standing to regulated access to markets rather than employment.
Where the wage once provided a common position from which participation was organised, access to goods and services now depends on credit systems, banking networks, digital payment platforms and identification systems that govern entry and continuation. Transactions are recorded, repayment histories are evaluated, and profiles are assembled over time. Continued access to housing, utilities, communication, transport and credit increasingly depends not on stable work but on sustaining participation within financial systems structured by borrowing and repayment.
Income from wages, transfers, remittances and informal activity now moves through bank accounts and mobile payment systems that record these flows over time. Credit enables people with uneven income streams to buy goods and services by committing future earnings to instalment payments set in advance. State payments such as pensions or cash support schemes also flow through these systems, and because they are paid on a predictable schedule, lenders use them to justify extending credit. Daily life becomes organised around meeting these payments, since housing, utilities, communication and mobility remain available only so long as payments continue. The management of repayment schedules becomes central to maintaining access to everyday infrastructures.
Citizenship does not disappear, but the basis on which it is organised shifts. Access to housing, utilities, communication, transport and credit increasingly depends on remaining inside financial systems structured by borrowing and repayment. The ability to relocate for work, remain mobile within cities, stay connected through communication networks, maintain a household or secure basic services relies on sustaining consumption within those systems.
The conditions under which rights are exercised and social life is sustained are no longer anchored in a shared position in work but are shaped by the rules governing lending, interest rates, default, and financial eligibility. Those rules determine who remains connected to essential infrastructures and who is pushed to the margins when consumption can no longer be maintained.
Citizenship without wage does not signal the disappearance of work, but it does mark the loss of wage labour as the institutional anchor through which access to social protections was once organised.
The writer is a political geographer and editor.
