The Price of Work

The economists tell you that the price of labor is dependent on productivity; the more skilled or rare or swift the laborer, the more the wage. I think that this fundamentally misunderstands the labor market.

First, there is the conventional problem of market inefficiency. In many if not most sectors, it's difficult to impossible to (from the supply side) line up the hours, terms, wages, conditions, or what have you that allow one position to compare with the next. This makes the price-product balance that a market depends on totally out of sync. From the demand side, the availability, productivity, and efficiency of labor (short of fundamentally flawed indicators like educational status, employer name, star sign, or credit rating) are also nigh-unpredictable, meaning that even if the will were there, it would not be easy to offer workers wages indexed to their productivity.

Secondly, and perhaps more insidiously, there is the human issue. If wages were, in fact, indexed to productivity, then the labor input should be precisely calibrated to the amount of output required. Short of good old eighteenth-century piecework methods, this never happens. People work to their maximum ability, or the least they can get away with, or some other random and arbitrary standard almost all of the time. It's a shame that the system seems to be set up so that an increasingly productive worker benefits himself not at all for being more diligent, more forward-looking, or more efficient, despite the assumption of this kind of thing being arguably one of the lynchpins of the system. Job interviews should run like this: "What kind of work do you need?" "What kind of output are you expecting?" "Okay, I'm going to need this much to do that level of work, and if it only takes me twenty minutes, or if I can do it standing on my head, I don't want to hear any crap out of you, because you're not paying for anything further. " This, while the theoretical transaction that is assumed to be going on, doesn't get you very far. Until you gain the ability to stop work when the task is complete without penalty, then the exchange is not efficient. (This, I assume, the origin of the whole labor union movement, with all of its warts.)

Short of an actual and explicit free-market exchange, we get these horrid power asymmetries that take advantage of the deeper time reserves of the capital side and competition between laborers who don't know the actual conditions of the offer, their competition, or the exchange value in the market.

People, it would seem, aren't numbers after all.

Uncle Karl, we hardly knew ye.