Does Biblical law require employers to pay their employees daily?

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Answered Questions

The law in question states:

13 “‘You shall not oppress your neighbor, nor rob him. “‘The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning. Leviticus 19:13WEB

Gary North suggests that this law is, "one of the rare cases in Scripture where God does prohibit a voluntary economic contract."[1]

Wrong. Biblical law supports voluntary, non-fraudulent contracts.

The intent of the law is to prohibit the "oppression" of the worker on the part of an employer. The specific oppression is the theft by an employer of the "choice value" (some call this the "time value") of the employee's wages. In a subsistence-level economy, even small disruptions of a worker's opportunity to exercise his choice with his money can have oppressive effects. The Biblical principle is: unless the worker agrees to the delayed payment, it is theft. But Biblical law does not allow civil government interference in voluntary, non-fraudulent transactions.[This is one of the distinctives of God's law which separates it from man's law: and it's an indictment of every single modern legal system.]

In modern times, workers might be paid weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. They often don't see the need to insist upon being paid at the end of each day of work. There are advantages to both the employer and employee to consolidating wages for a particular time period. (However, if you are working for an employer with such a tight "cash flow" that they couldn't make payroll if they had to pay their workers each day, then you might consider looking for an employer that manages their money better.)

As a Biblical principle of stewardship, in caring for your family, you should not (if you have the choice) be living even "paycheck-to-paycheck," much less "daily wage-to-daily wage". If you are truly "poor" (the way many in the Third world are), then you are probably not reading this web article. And we won't even talk about voluntarily going into debt.

Someone might suggest: "the employer is profiting off the employee by not paying him interest for those [two or four] weeks; that is theft!" It would be theft, if that was not voluntarily (contractually) agreed to by the employee. When the employee negotiates his wage, he is also negotiating the "choice value" of being paid every two weeks (or every month). The interest (which is the rental price of the wage's "choice value") becomes included in the wage, by definition. The employer cannot be accused of stealing what he is already paying for.

  1. North, Boundaries and Dominion (2012), see pages 378-379.