Iron Law of Wages

The iron law of wages is a proposed law of economics asserting that real wages tend, in the long run, always toward the minimum needed to sustain the life of the worker. The theory was first named by Ferdinand Lassalle in the mid-nineteenth century; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attributed the doctrine itself to Lassalle, traced the underlying idea to Thomas Malthus 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, and traced the iron law terminology to a phrase of Goethe.