The Shabby House That Thatcher Built
Paul says,
“In highly information centred work, especially with smart mobile devices, work and leisure time are substantially blurred. This has over a relatively short period loosened the bond between wages and work-time.” (p 209)
However, this again is a reflection of Paul's failure to properly grasp the distinction between labour and labour-power. The bourgeoisie presents wages as “the price of labour”. In other words, the wages you are paid is the price/value of the labour you provide. But, Marx showed in Capital I that this is absurd. If it were true, surplus value/profit would be impossible – though of course, the bourgeoisie have no difficulty in thereby arguing that the profit arises from elsewhere, rather than from labour. What wages are is not the price of labour – itself an irrational concept – but the value/price of labour-power. They are the price of reproducing labour-power, i.e. of reproducing the labourer. The obvious illustration of that was that, in the early days of the 19th century, when capital required workers to provide more labour, and so increased the length of the working-day, they saw no necessary reason to increase wages to cover the additional labour provided.
The wage is based upon a number of averages – the average life of a worker, and so the average value of commodities required for their subsistence during that time; the average working-day, and so the average hourly wage the worker requires to produce the wage required for their subsistence. But, here arises an obvious problem for capital. Suppose, on average, workers require £500 per week to reproduce their labour-power, i.e. to buy the necessary wage goods. Say that is £100 per day, £10 per hour, based on a 10 hour day. If the working-day falls to 7.5 hours that does not change the fact that workers still require £100 for the day, so their hourly wage must rise to £13.33 per hour. So, if we take a situation where a significant number of workers are employed precariously, on a small number of hours per day/week, then either these workers must get a correspondingly higher hourly rate of pay, or else they are unable to obtain wages equal to the value of their labour-power.
The former can happen in some conditions. In the early 1980's, I was employed as a part-time, temporary lecturer. The average wage at that time was probably around £200 per week, or £5 per hour. By contrast, I was paid £25 per hour, and the reason was that, whilst this was great, at the start of the year, when I had 20 hours work per week, it was not so good towards the end of the year, when the amount of work fell to only around 2 hours per week. For most temporary workers this is not the case. Temporary workers supplied to the NHS, and other places, tend to be supplied by agencies, and whilst the agency charges a premium rate, that is not reflected in the wages they pass on to the worker. Its one reason we should, via the TUC and Co-op, develop a cooperative employment agency, able to exercise a monopoly supply of labour-power. It's also why Labour should introduce a minimum weekly wage, rather than a minimum hourly wage.
The consequence of all this precarity for capital, in general, therefore, is debilitating. Its another reason that economies like the UK that have built an economic model built upon it over the last thirty years, suffer such atrocious levels of productivity growth. The most precarious employment tends also to pay the lowest hourly wages, especially when the actual amount of time spent by the worker, rather than just contact time, is taken into consideration. Yet, for labour-power to be reproduced, workers must obtain sufficient revenue for that purpose. If workers require £500 per week to reproduce their labour-power, but in practice only earn £200, because they get insufficient employment, the other £300 per week has to be made good from somewhere. Inevitably it is made up in benefits provided by the state. As with the Parish Relief described by Marx in Capital I, even if it appears to be the case that these benefits are paid for out of taxes collected from workers' wages, for the reasons already described, this cannot be the case. The taxes are a deduction from profits. In other words, precarity and the other practices of low paying firms are subsidised out of the profits of other firms in the economy. That undermines the capital accumulation of these other, more profitable, and higher paying firms, which thereby reduces productivity growth. Moreover, because all of these transfers, the collection of taxes and payment of benefits requires a large bureaucracy for its implementation, that represents in an unproductive drain of value from the system that could also otherwise have gone to capital accumulation. But, this is just another feature of the inefficient economic model that Thatcher built from the 1980's onwards, designed to protect the interests of the small capitalists that make up the core support of the Tories, and that conservative social democrats have perpetuated.
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