Exploitative Pay
Conscription is a system of forced labour paid poverty rates. The conscript is not hired, does not bargain, and cannot walk away. He is seized by the state, placed under military control, and then compensated far below what his time, effort, risk, and physical strain would command in any other job. He is put through significant financial distress oftentimes left to struggle to afford basic necessities.
Conscription is a system of forced labour paid abusive wages
CONSCRIPTION’S COERCED PAY LEAVES YOUNG MEN IMPOVERISHED
At its most basic institutional level, conscription rests on exploitative pay and financial abuse. The conscript is not hired at a market wage. He is compelled into service and then paid far below what his labour would command under voluntary conditions. Renowned conscription researcher Panu Poutvaara makes this point clearly in Conscription: Economic Costs and Political Allure: “Economically, the draft is a tax in the form of coerced and typically underpaid labor services whereas its alternative, the professional army, recruits its staff from the labor market and compensates it out of the revenues from fiscal (i.e., money) taxes.”
Thus, conscription by its very nature seeks to extract free or severely discounted labour from men forced against their will into military service. The forced recruit is treated as a supply of labour available at little to no cost. Consequently, the pay he receives for months or years spent in military garrisons is among the lowest he, or almost anyone else in society, will ever encounter.
Helpful to this arrangement is the reframing of conscription as “service” and “duty,” rather than work and labour. Through this linguistic trick, conscripts suddenly become the one group deemed undeserving of just pay: pay that would reflect the time, effort, risk, and physical strain expected of them, pay they would receive in any comparable civilian job.
Indeed, conscripts are often required to perform activities involving serious physical exhaustion, equivalent to some of the most demanding forms of blue-collar work, while also enduring extremely long working hours. Living in military barracks, they remain under the effective control of their employer around the clock. And yet, despite this near-total control over their time and body, they are typically among the lowest earners in the entire economy. So low, in fact, that what is demanded of them would be plainly illegal under minimum-wage rules and labour-protection schemes in almost any workplace, they will later go on to.
This, of course, also produces long-term economic damage, explored in greater detail on this page of our case against conscription. But the most immediate consequence is simpler and more brutal: men are thrown into sudden financial distress. Their standard of living is sharply degraded overnight. They struggle to afford basic necessities and fixed costs that do not disappear merely because the state has ordered them into uniform.
Rent still has to be paid. Loans still have to be serviced. Families still have to be fed. For many conscripts, this immediately undermines their ability to support those who depend on them: spouses, children, elderly parents, or other relatives. Some, in the short breaks between the gruelling physical demands of military training, are forced to seek second jobs. Others face a logistical nightmare, having to move back in with their parents for the duration of service, abandon their current household, or rearrange their entire life around the poverty imposed on them by the state.
Some begin to eat into their savings or are forced to turn to their parents simply to cope with the costs of service. The stress and despair produced by this financial abuse are often forgotten in discussions of conscription. Yet they deserve serious attention. Conscription is not only a demand on a man’s body and time. It is also a direct assault on his financial stability, his independence, and his ability to care for those around him.
The Draft’s Tradition of Poverty Wages
Poor pay for conscripts is not an accident. It is nearly universal to the institution. If conscripts were paid adequately, at anything resembling the market value of their labour, the fiscal case for conscription would collapse. The state could no longer pretend that the draft is a cheaper alternative to a professional army. It would merely be another way of hiring soldiers, stripped of its main financial advantage.
The map to the side, taken from our report The Nordic Conscription Myth, illustrates the point with particular clarity. Across Europe, conscription regimes are immediately recognisable by the extremely low pay they offer soldiers. Even when adjusted for living costs, conscript pay remains far below the wages offered in professional armed forces.
The worst case in this regard has long been Greece, where until 2025 conscripts received the extraordinary monthly compensation of just €8.80. From 2026, they are set to receive €100 per month for border and Aegean postings, and €50 per month for inland postings. Even this reform leaves conscript pay at roughly 10% and 5% of the Greek minimum wage respectively. Before the reform, it stood at barely 1%.
Out of the Nordic states, the worst pay conditions are present in Finland. During the first 165 days of service, conscripts receive a starvation-level allowance of just €6.15 a day. Those kept on for an additional three months receive €10.20 a day, while those required to serve for a full year receive €14.25 a day during their final three months. In monthly terms, that comes to roughly €185 during the first half of the year, €306 over the next three months, and €427 in the last three. This is all the more severe in a country where even basic living costs are among the highest in Europe. In the first phase of service, a Finnish conscript who is effectively under military control 24 hours a day earns barely €0.26 an hour. In purely nominal terms, this is about what a minimum wage worker in Nigeria earns today.
Sweden presents a less extreme case, but the allowance remains modest. Conscripts receive about €18.55 per service day, amounting to roughly €556 a month, with about €8.35 allowance for food on leave days. Those who complete service receive a lump sum premium equal to the total daily allowances earned during training. Dependent then on completion, conscripts are paid between €0.77 and €1.55 per hour of their service. This again is the minimum wage one earns in Ivory Coast, and not in an advanced European nation.
In Norway, conscripts receive a tax-free monthly service allowance of about €652, or roughly €21.74 a day, alongside certain family and child supplements. Those who complete twelve months of service are also entitled to a demobilisation payment of around €4,187. This amounts to about €0.95 per hour, rising to roughly €1.45 for those who end up serving the entirety of 12 months. Compared with Finland and Sweden, the sums are somewhat higher, but this has to be seen in light of having to afford life in a country with some of the highest living costs in Europe.
Denmark stands apart from the rest of the Nordic cases. Army conscripts receive a monthly wage of about €1,209, together with a tax-free food allowance of roughly €37 per day. Taken together, this produces a level of official compensation an order of magnitude higher than the starvation wages of Finland, Sweden, or Norway and somewhat close to the compensation offered by the professional forces across Europe. Official recruitment figures suggest that this leads to higher motivation: in both 2023 and 2024, all places were filled by volunteers rather than by compulsion.
South Korea offers a similar illustration. In 2017, conscript pay was so low that the reform target was merely to raise it to 30% of the minimum wage in 2018, then 40% by 2020, and 50% by 2022. A 2018 Agence France-Presse report, put the point even more bluntly: South Korea nearly doubled the wages of its conscripts, yet they still remained “just a fraction” of the country’s minimum wage.
The Draft’s Insulting Compensation Package
A defender of conscription might, of course, object at this point. Surely, he might say, conscripts receive more than their meagre pay. They are also given substantial in-kind benefits: accommodation in military barracks, issued clothing in the form of underwear and uniforms, food, and at least some basic hygiene products.
Still, to praise accommodation as a benefit of conscription is to speak from a position quite detached from the realities of army life. In many European countries, conscripts are forced for months of their lives to live in close quarters that fall far below ordinary civilian standards of space, privacy, comfort, and basic amenities. Their accommodation is subject to constant inspections, which strip away any semblance of individual choice in how the space is used or made comfortable. What is presented as “free housing” is, in practice, compulsory residence in a controlled institutional environment.
Nor would a work uniform be treated as much of a reward in any other workplace. Worse still, conscripts are sometimes made financially liable for military clothing and equipment lost or damaged during service. In Norway, for example, the armed forces state that a soldier who loses or destroys issued clothing or equipment may have to pay for it.
Worse still, even in some of Europe’s richest countries, these already limited “conscription freebies” are often delivered in an unacceptable state, with the army failing to provide adequate clothing, accommodation, or food. As we note in our report on the Nordics:
“[In Finland] Conscripts are also forced to endure the harsh realities of army life, which at times morphs into economic abuse. In 2020, extensive media reports revealed that conscripts were being underfed during energy-intensive field exercises, with portions too small to meet basic nutritional needs.18 The Conscripts’ Union warned that performance was suffering because conscripts were receiving too little food in the field. Problems were especially serious for those with special dietary requirements, who were at times left without any meals altogether. Young Finnish men were thus trapped in military barracks, ordered into painstaking physical work and starved. In 2023, reports also emerged of dead rodents contaminating food served to young soldiers. Conscripts also note that crowded barracks hinder education prospects, as it is difficult to study for entry exams, especially at the start of service, when free evenings are scarce and studying after lights out is difficult.
[In Sweden]The Conscript Council has also highlighted the extent of the shortages confronting those in service. As it notes, “It also happens that conscripts themselves pay for items of equipment that are necessary for service.” More broadly, it reports that “in many places, conscription training has been marked by infrastructural shortcomings,” affecting access to “common rooms and recreation areas, sick bays, classrooms, and sanitary facilities.” At Skövde Garrison, “the lack of space is acute,” and the garrison has stated that it “does not know how future cohorts of conscripts will be accommodated.” At the Skaraborg Regiment, there is “a lack of both common rooms and sick quarters,” while in some cases the shortage is so basic that conscripts “do not even have access to lockers for storing personal belongings.”
These deficiencies carry serious health implications. The Council warns that “the lack of accommodation for sick conscripts has become a serious workplace and health issue,” because “it is impossible to separate the ill from the healthy.” In several places, the lack of proper space has also led to “improper handling of weapons maintenance involving harmful chemicals, such as CLP,” including cases where it has been “carried out on sleeping mats that conscripts later sleep on.” Nor are the shortages limited to accommodation. The Council reports “an insufficient supply of training facilities such as firing ranges, live-fire areas, training spaces, classrooms, and garages needed to conduct effective training.”
Finally, the physical condition of many facilities appears alarmingly poor. At several training locations, conscripts, officers, and health staff report “black mould, woodlice, and mice, drying rooms that do not work, and ventilation and heating systems of a very low standard.” Several units also believe that “it takes an unreasonably long time to fix these problems.”
As in Sweden, Norwegian conscripts also face serious problems with inadequate facilities. Some camps lack proper sports and welfare infrastructure, leaving certain conscripts without access to training facilities needed to maintain or improve their physical fitness. Conditions in other locations appear even worse. At one base, an inspection rated the accommodation close to uninhabitable, citing cramped rooms, poor indoor air quality, and mould in the showers. As one report described it: “Mould in the ceiling. Inside the barracks, the corridor is full of worn-out lockers that do not fit inside the rooms. The air feels stuffy because of poor ventilation, but it is the shower facilities the soldiers think are the worst.” The same account noted that “the toilets have no ceiling lights, door handles are coming loose, and chairs are missing backrests,” while “several rooms have reed diffusers and scented candles to cover up the bad smell.” Even more strikingly, the conscripts interviewed stressed that their own conditions were still better than those of the guard soldiers, some of whom were forced to sleep on camping mats because the rooms were overcrowded.
Bottlenecks also extend to basic uniform items. In one case, a conscript was still missing his name badge seven months into service and had been forced to attach a strip of white tape to his uniform instead. Food provision appears equally troubling. There are reports of soldiers receiving too little food during winter training, prompting concern from officers responsible for welfare.
The problem does not seem confined to field conditions. A 2025 news report found that soldiers were regularly discarding meals served in the barracks because, in their words, “We think it looks pretty unappetising, and we don’t think it tastes good. There’s very little variety, almost no fruit, and almost no vegetables. The food is often oily, and it’s not always fully cooked.” One soldier estimated that he ate in the canteen only two days out of fourteen, with him and others instead having to cook for themselves or order food despite their limited means. “We mostly cook our own food, and if we don’t have time for that, we order food. Even though we really can’t afford it. We want to spend the little money we get on other things,” he explained. The same report described fish oil capsules long past their expiry date, brown fruit, as well as milk and juice containing lumps. According to the soldiers, officers had even handed out a Domino’s discount code because they knew that the food provided was at times insufficient.
Denmark also faces serious infrastructural deficiencies. One media report described barracks with “mould on the walls, toilets that will not flush, and ice cold showers for soldiers returning from exercises,” as well as “the risk of falling windows and roof tiles.” Defence Minister even acknowledged the severity of the problem, saying he could well understand why personnel had left the military after being housed in filthy barracks.
The Financial Despair Behind the Draft
Thus, the state’s scheme to extract labour at almost no cost leaves young men impoverished, dependent, and trapped in a financial struggle they cannot escape until their service is over. A particularly revealing case study comes, once again, from the Nordics:
“The current pay scheme is plainly insufficient to secure anything resembling a dignified standard of living for the teenagers compelled into military service. Finland’s official conscript body, the Conscript Union, has been warning about this for decades, to no avail. One of its recurring arguments is that many prisoners earn more behind bars than the conscripts serving their country. Still, the Finnish decision-makers appear to value the time of murderers, rapists, and thieves more highly than that of the young men tasked with national defence.
Abusive pay results in acute everyday financial struggles for young men. Conscript Union’s chairman has pointed out that many conscripts resort to their savings or have to take on debt to cope with the costs of their service. Media reports suggest that many conscripts can barely afford to cover rent and other mandatory expenses, and then struggle with affording phone bills or food and hygiene products during leave and holidays. A Finnish conscript magazine reports that these financial pressures cause significant everyday stress, and that even officer candidates are forced to lower their standard of living on weekends.21 Young men are often left with no option but to turn to their parents for money. Others are forced to maintain second jobs. Some soldiers interviewed by the media estimated that roughly a third of their peers take on gig work during leave, effectively trapping them in a cycle of gruelling military training and exhausting part-time work during the little respite weekend leave is supposed to provide. Worse still, conscripts who try to supplement these meagre allowances through outside work can end up losing part of their state financial aid.
For some, the problem is not only the need to work during service, but the difficulty of finding work that can be done around it. A Finnish conscript magazine reports that many conscripts try to earn money alongside their service, yet the scarcity of weekend jobs and the sheer exhaustion of military life often make that difficult. As one sergeant put it, “You don’t have the energy, but you have to work.” For many, service also means watching their savings steadily disappear. As the magazine notes, many conscripts seek outside work precisely so that “their savings do not get depleted as severely.” Even so, many interviewees said that “their finances are in the red compared with the period before service.”
In Sweden, too, the Conscript Council has sounded the alarm over inadequate pay. Its chair, Alice Westlund, has said that it is difficult for conscripts to make their allowance last during leave, let alone save any money. She also warns that such low compensation may undermine defence willingness of young people. Another council member notes that “today, conscripts receive such low compensation that they fall behind financially compared with their peers.”
While housing support exists to ensure that conscripts are not left homeless during weekends and holidays, and are not forced to leave their apartments, the system does not always work as intended in practice. Swedish teens who have only recently moved out of their parents’ homes and lack an established record of rent payments can have their applications denied. In a widely discussed 2024 case, a 20 year old conscript was refused housing support because he could not prove he had covered his rent independently. The decision effectively left him struggling with rent costs amounting to over 80% of his monthly allowance.
Furthermore, the Conscript Council pointed out in its report that: “In today’s society, conscripts are losing purchasing power and have to give up even simple pleasures or local transport passes during leave, even though such things are important to ensure that young people do not lose their social ties or contact with friends. We are not demanding a life of luxury, but compensation that makes it possible during time off to socialise with civilian friends on equal terms and, after training, with the help of the training bonus, to rent a first apartment and begin studies or working life with more than just a few coins in one’s pocket. The Conscription Council has also noted several cases in which conscripts with fixed expenses such as housing and car costs, despite additional support in the form of family allowance or a special interest-free loan, still cannot make ends meet. (…) Despite the sharp inflation of the past eight years, the daily allowance has not been adjusted.”
They also illustrate that the meal allowance cannot possibly cover the food costs in many cases: “For meals that conscripts are unable to prepare themselves, for example, while travelling to and from their unit, even a cheap dinner may consist of something like a Big Mac & Co. meal. That meal now costs 94 kronor. This means that conscripts are already four kronor out of pocket that day, with no money left for any other meals. (…) Travel reimbursement is also too low and means that conscripts who use their own cars to travel home during leave are not actually offered cost-free travel. At present, conscripts are reimbursed at 14.5 kronor per ten kilometres for the cheapest mode of travel. The Swedish Tax Agency, by contrast, estimates the cost per ten kilometres at 25 kronor. (…) The current system for booking conscripts’ travel does not function well and creates an enormous administrative burden (…) In many cases, conscripts are given unnecessarily long routes with complicated connections, since they are tied to a specific departure and therefore cannot adjust their travel plans if changes arise. Conscripts report that this leaves them with far too little time at home and that in some cases they do not arrive home until late at night. Journeys lasting more than eight hours are not uncommon.”
When it comes to housing support, a similar dynamic is at play as in Sweden. In one case, the denial of housing support to a serviceman renting from his parents left him unable to continue his service, even though his superior argued that covering the shortfall would have been far cheaper than training a replacement through the same courses and certification requirements for international NATO operations.
In Norway, too, low pay and long stretches of downtime leave many conscripts scrambling for second jobs to stay financially afloat. The strain can be so severe that some would rather not go home during leave to avoid the associated costs. In one telling case brought to the ombudsman, a conscript asked to remain on base so that he could eat in the mess hall, explaining that he could not afford to support himself otherwise. His request was denied by an officer saddling him with unaffordable living costs.”
A very similar pattern can be found in Austria. The country’s housing-cost allowance, family maintenance, and partner maintenance schemes are claim-based, dependent on documentary proof and strict eligibility criteria. Reporting by the national ombudsman includes cases in which conscripts challenged denials of housing-cost support, illustrating how their ability to cope financially can hinge on bureaucratic definitions and evidentiary standards, such as what counts as a rent-paying “own” household.
Just as much financial struggle can be found in the Greek example. As one media story reports:
“Greek families with sons doing their military service are finding it harder to make ends meet. Although the length of compulsory service has been gradually reduced, the minimum outlay for a conscript continues to rise in line with the rising costs of living in general. A year in the military costs a conscript between 3,000 and 4,000 euros – the State pays him just 8.80 euros per month (…) The National Defense Ministry explains this extremely low amount with the argument that it is only meant to be symbolic, not provide real assistance. «This amount does not represent a wage, but is a purely symbolic sum that was recently adjusted for some categories of conscripts with particular problems,»
As a result, the conscript’s family is forced to pay for the youth’s support to the tune of at least 3,000 euros a year. «When my son was sent to the Evros border, he knew there was not much money available, so he ate mostly at the military camp and did not order out. When he had leave, he spent as little as possible. But I think he must have spent at least 3,500 euros (over the year),» said Antonia Papadaki, who works in the private sector. «I think it was quite a feat to have spent so little. Friends say they spent 4,500 or even 5,000 euros. «Every third day it was the same tune – ‘Dad, I need more money.’ (…) «Since your country keeps you out of the job market for a length of time, it should at least help you to get by, even partially, said A.P. who is serving at the border. (…) An unusual although indicative case is that of K.S., who is an orphan but managed to work and study in the provinces and to rent an apartment. «When I was called up, I was desperate. I had to leave home and manage on the military allowance. Fortunately, I lived with my girlfriend, who paid the expenses of the apartment. As for the rest, I lived off ‘subsidies’ from friends.»
Just as severe is the situation in the nearby Cyprus. According to media reports:
“Young men, some of whom are new parents to small children, are reportedly living in conditions of extreme financial hardship, lacking stable housing or the basic ability to cover daily needs. A particular concern is the fact that some conscripts avoid taking leave because they have no place to stay overnight or money for food. There were even cases where National Guardsmen did not wish to be discharged from the National Guard.
According to the same sources, in several instances, unit commanders show solidarity with these troops and help them by offering funds from their own savings to cover the soldiers’ basic necessities. We were told that such cases are not isolated incidents but appear to concern the majority of social support cases brought before the command structures.”
The issue gains particular importance as it relates directly to the conscripts’ mental health. Socio-economic insecurity, lack of support, and a feeling of hopelessness are factors that, according to experts, can severely affect the psychology of young people at a vulnerable age.
Peer and Direct Superior Financial Abuse
In some cases, financial desperation also opens the door to direct abuse and petty theft by peers and superiors. A telling example comes from Finland, where a 2024 prosecution case involved non-commissioned officers who allegedly subjected recruits to arbitrary and degrading treatment. They also forced recruits to perform unnecessary push-ups and demanded free soft drinks from them. According to the prosecution, if recruits wanted to buy a drink from a vending machine, they were required to buy bottles for the NCOs as well. Such cases show how the abusive pay structure of conscription can create the conditions for petty extortion, even over something as basic as food and drinks.
The most direct form of financial violence can be found in Russia. As Human Rights Watch’s report on hazing and abuse under dedovshchina shows, property rights and personal belongings are effectively not protected for first-year conscripts. Their money, food, clothing, and possessions can become targets of routine extortion by older soldiers, turning conscription into a system not only of forced labour, but of internal predation.
“the dedy confiscate the belongings and money of first-year conscripts, confiscate their salaries, and frequently make them beg for money from relatives or on the street. The dedy took away Alexander D.’s belongings, and sent him and his peers out to beg for money to buy vodka: “They forced us to walk around the [train] platform and ask for money from people. We were supposed to say that we need money to call home: ‘Please give us some change.'” (…) dedy use dedovshchina so consistently to prey on new recruits’ money, food, and clothing, and to coerce them into procuring the same Conscripts face the constant threat of violent punishment for failing to surrender their property, no matter how meager, or to procure food, cigarettes, and the like.
They told Human Rights Watch that dedy routinely confiscated their property immediately upon arrival at the unit; forced them to hand over their salaries every month, as well as food and money they received in the mail or during visits from their parents. (…) The dedy’s demands that first-year conscripts procure for them were so routine that, in many cases, they placed the conscripts in a permanent state of servitude. (…) A number of conscripts recounted how dedy demanded that they give them money, cigarettes and other goods that they did not have. These conscripts said the dedy did not care how they got these goods, by begging, stealing, or otherwise, and that they faced physical violence if they failed to deliver. (…)The mother of another conscript said that dedy put her son and his peers out on the streets at night with orders for vodka and sausage. She said:
These poor soldiers stand in Severomorsk with outstretched hands. I saw it myself when I drove by, they stood there They also sent my son he doesn’t get rest at night, he’s already sick because he doesn’t sleep And then, what can [he] do, he knows that if he does not bring vodka and sausage back [he will be punished]. and who will give him money at night? So he either has to steal handbags from women, or rob apartments, or sell himself. [My son] was beaten for returning without anything.”
In Russia, financial abuse also comes from above. In one absurd case, conscripts were allegedly forced by officers to steal military cables and sell them for scrap. Those same acts were then used against them as blackmail, with superiors pressuring them to sign contracts and go fight in Ukraine.
“According to prosecutors, the soldiers burned off the insulation from cables stored at a command post in the Leningrad region, extracted the copper, and hauled it to a nearby scrap collection point every few days. (…) Vitaly Rusakov told investigators that in July 2025, Senior Lieutenant Alexander Korendyasov ordered him and three fellow service members to haul away the cables. According to Rusakov, the officer threatened to send the conscripts to Ukraine if they refused. Vitaly’s stepfather says the conscripts handed over all the proceeds to Korendyasov.”
The State’s Captive Workforce
Abuse also surfaces in the form of forcing conscripts into work that has little or nothing to do with national defence, whether through direct orders or through the financial desperation created by service itself.
In Finland, the effort to avoid paying conscripts has at times taken absurd forms. Defence Properties Finland officials, for example, suggested that conscripts could be used for (not required by the law) work on military land in exchange for nothing more than coffee vouchers.
In Brazil, even young men who are not ultimately incorporated into the army can still be pulled into the economic machinery of conscription. In Bahia, the construction industry union Sinduscon-BA signed a cooperation agreement with the Brazilian Army to train men deemed fit for compulsory service but left out because the army had more eligible recruits than places. The program seems to be a masked way for the company to extract free labour from the the young men, under the guise of training in construction skills. The young men having no say in whether they want to subsidize the civilian industry.
Still, this pales in comparison with Egypt which fuses ordinary military conscription with the military’s vast civilian business empire. Conscripts are used as “cheap labour” across military-owned factories, farms, hotels, petrol stations, hospitals, construction projects, and trading companies. In 1986 for instance 30,000 conscripts were organised into “development battalions” assigned entirely unrelated to defence work in construction and manufacturing. Human Rights Watch wrote still in 2020 that the military most likely uses thousands of young men as unpaid labour through mandatory conscription.
And while the Egyptian case may sound especially dysfunctional, its European equivalent can be found in countries such as Finland, Switzerland, and Austria, in the form of alternative civilian service. Young men are forced into labour that has no real justification in national defence, but instead benefits social pressure groups, public institutions, NGOs, and private interests that then fight to preserve the exploitative system on which they rely. Here the absurdity is even more visible: one can see a coerced, unpaid or severely underpaid young man working side by side with a low-skilled employee who is properly paid for doing the very same job.
It is therefore common to see intense lobbying in favour of conscription and alternative civilian service from concentrated interests that benefit from the system. In 2026, as Austria debated extending conscription, the Federation of Austrian Industries offered a self-servingly helpful endorsement of a new model that would last even longer than the current one. In Germany, meanwhile, the country’s shipowners have lobbied for merchant-sea service to be recognised within the evolving national-service framework, presenting it as both a strategic necessity and a workforce solution. At its annual meeting in Hamburg, the German Shipowners’ Association proposed that service in the merchant marine should count as an option within voluntary military service and, if conscription is restored in the future, as a civilian alternative to compulsory military duty. Such shameless lobbying for private gain is a natural consequence of the rent created by abusively underpaid labour.
Ending
The poverty of conscript pay is not merely an unfortunate defect of the system. It is the system. Conscription creates the one wage relationship in the economy that escapes almost every ordinary protection. Minimum-wage laws do not apply, nor does the labour law. The conscript cannot bargain, cannot unionise, and cannot threaten his employer with exit. He is not a worker before the law, even though he works. He is not a volunteer, even though the state speaks of service. He is a captive labourer placed outside the protections that everyone else is told define a civilised labour market.
That legal exception is what makes everything else possible: the poverty pay, the miserable “benefits,” the dependence on parents, the unpaid extra work, the petty extortion, the lobbying by institutions eager to preserve access to cheap labour. The state has carved out a single category of worker to whom none of the normal rules apply. That category is young men it has grabbed.
The result is not public service, but a labour regime built on coercion, underpayment, and legal exclusion. Conscription survives fiscally because it hides its real costs inside the private lives of conscripts and their families. The state gets labour at a discount because the men providing it are not allowed to say no. They deserve such choice.
Explore the evidence
Conscription: Economic Costs and Political Allure
The Nordic Conscription Myth: What They Never Tell You About Total Defence
Presentation of the Draft Law Titled ‘Roadmap for the Transition of the Armed Forces to the New Era’ by the Minister of National Defence N. Dendias
South Korea Doubles Wages of Its Rank-and-File Conscripted Soldiers
Bericht der Volksanwaltschaft an den Nationalrat und an den Bundesrat 2021: Kontrolle der öffentlichen Verwaltung
Military Service Expensive for Conscripts
The Wrongs of Passage: Inhuman and Degrading Treatment of New Recruits in the Russian Armed Forces
How Do You Force Russian Conscripts into Combat? Threaten Them with Deployment If They Won’t Steal for You, Then Threaten Them with Prison After They’ve Been Charged
Sinduscon-BA e Exército firmam parceria para capacitar jovens para o setor da construção civil.
German Shipowners Push Maritime Service as New National Service Option
Military Service Reform: Broad Alliance Pushes for Implementation of ‘Austria Plus'
Even behind bars, one can earn better than inside the barracks gates.” “The compensation can be nearly 9 euros a day.
Many respondents said they could not get by on the daily allowance and had to rely on parents, savings, or debt. One asked how it was possible for an open prisoner to receive more compensation than a conscript
The Conscripts’ Union warned that inadequate nutrition combined with hard training reduces performance, that field portions had been too small, and that some conscripts with special dietary needs had at times received no food at all
Across Finland, conscripts and their families reported that field catering left conscripts hungry. The Defence Forces said portion sizes had been increased, but admitted there was still work to do
There have been ideas that if conscripts could be brought in for this work in exchange for coffee vouchers in the evening
A social curator at the Guard Jaeger Regiment estimated, based on his conversations with young people, that more than a third of conscripts receiving military assistance in the spring intake were doing gig work during leave
Conscripts interviewed by Ruotuväki said weekend money disappears into food and basic living costs, that many want to work during service so their savings are not depleted, and, as one sergeant put it, ‘You don’t have the energy, but you have to work.
It is difficult to make the money last during leave and save anything while doing conscription,’ said Alice Westlund, chair of the Conscript Council, who also warned that low compensation may affect young people’s willingness to defend the country
With current and future compensation levels, conscripts receive ‘a financial penalty’ at the start of adult life, while their peers can save, work, or build qualifications for the future.
A 20 year old conscript in Stockholm was denied housing support because he could not prove that, for at least three months before service, he had independently paid his rent with his own funds, leaving him to serve on roughly SEK 4,380 a month against rent of SEK 3,650.
