CONCEPT
The Parasitic Trade
Webb's term for an industry that survives not by creating value but by paying wages below subsistence — externalizing costs onto the public, the family, or the worker's own body.
A parasitic trade, as Sidney and Beatrice Webb defined it, is an industry whose apparent profitability depends on paying workers less than the cost of keeping them alive and functional. The difference between the cost of labour and the wage actually paid is externalized: onto the public purse through poor relief, onto the worker's family through unpaid domestic labour, onto the worker's own body through malnutrition, exhaustion, and premature death. The Webbs argued that the parasitic trade was not merely unjust but economically irrational — an industry that consumed its workers faster than they could be replaced was not creating wealth but destroying it, sustaining an illusion of prosperity through the invisible subsidy of human suffering.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept applies with disturbing precision to the platform economy that AI is accelerating. The architecture of extraction operates through three channels: the classification of workers as independent contractors rather than employees, externalizing the costs of employment onto the