piece-raten.adj.

1842 Coventry Herald 4 Mar. 4/1 No man who possesses any practical knowledge as to the state of the mass of the people, will hesitate to answer, that the prevailing tendency of wages—either by positive reductions in the daily, weekly, or piece rate, or by a diminished proportion of employment—that by one or other, or all of these processes, the decided course of wages with the working classes is to become less year by year, without any diminution in the price of provisions.

1880 Times 13 Aug. 6/5 In April, 1879, a revision took place in the wages and piece rates of the persons employed in the Pimlico factory.

1920 Jrnl. Polit. Econ. 28 196 Whereas cherry picking, which used to command a piece rate of 1 cent per pound, rose to 3 and 4 cents in 1919.

1937 H. Jennings et al. May 12th Mass-observ. Day-surv. i. iv. 308 They work on piece rates. So if they slow up, it's their own loss.

1990 R. Izhar Accounting, Costing, & Managem. ii. xiv. 226 They may be classified into two broad types of payment—time rate and piecework (or piece-rate).

1896 Polit. Sci. Q. 11 586 Three papers on the wages question, namely: ‘Gain Sharing’..; ‘The Premium Plan of Paying for Labor’..; and ‘The Piece-Rate System’.

1910 Jrnl. Royal Statist. Soc. 74 101 Among hand-workers and workers who control their machines, systems of pace-setting are combined with piece-rate payments to keep up the speed.

1954 J. A. C. Brown Social Psychol. of Industry vi. 181 Workers..who are paid on an individual piece-rate basis.

1995 Atlantic Monthly Nov. 94/2 If a grower wants berries quickly removed from the field, the wages are piece-rate, providing an incentive to move fast.