Where the actual price ends up is usually a function of the power and skill of the parties.

Right.

You are claiming that the low-pay condition is the only “valid” price. Why?

Well, not really. I’m claiming that the low-pay condition is A valid price; you’re willing to work for that rate, I’m willing to pay you, hooray.

As I look around my Network Operations Center, which is staffed by people who all are earning at least $40K US/year and some up to $100K US/year, I see Caucasians, Blacks, Hispanics, and Orientals, both male and female. Some native born, some immigrants. I’ve spent a significant period of my working life reporting either directly or one-step-up to a black male or a white female; sometimes both my supervisor and his/her supervisor were either female or black, including a Director and a Vice President. I generally have worked for Fortune 500 companies, and I’ve seen lots of this. So my answer to that question is, “people who took it upon themselves to learn a high-paying skill”. Many of them never went to college - they learned their present skills while they were working at lower-paying jobs, often on the night shift.

If you randomly hire a cleaning person in the Chicago area, there’s an excellent chance that a white woman will show up on your doorstep. She’ll probably speak Polish as her native language, although it might be English with a strong Irish brogue. I find your resort to what appears to me at least to be an implicit accusation of racism is baseless, offensive and diversionary.

There is usually a gray area in price assignment. That area reflects the reality that the maximum people will pay for a product (if forced to do so) is usually less than what the product would sell for. (I’m using “product” to include work product and wages.) It’s a bit like a confidence interval.

To use your car example: Someone goes onto a lot to buy a car of unknown price. Let’s assume for a moment they’re willing to pay a maximum of $14,500 to get the car. The car dealer would like to sell the car for as much as possible, but hey are willing to sell it for as little as $14,000.

There is $500 of overlap. I refer to this as the “gray area”, mostly because I can’t recall the exact term. The transaction will therefore happen–but at what price?

If you begin from the premise that something is overpriced/not available, and then you RAISE the price until the sale occurs, it will tend to select the highest price in the “gray area.” If the manufacturer starts at $15,000 lowers the price by units of $100, then in theory the buyer shoudl purchase the car when the price hits $14,500.

OTOH, if you begin from the premise that something is underpriced/widely available, and RAISE the price it will tend to select the lowest price in the “gray area.” If the buyer starts by offering $13,500 and then goes up from there, in theory the sales agent should acceot a $14,000 offer.

Where the actual price ends up is usually a function of the power and skill of the parties.

Now, the work analogy:
If you start from a condition where the workers are underpaid and widely available, you will never reach the maximum wage which the business is willing to pay. Obviously, so long as there are workers, the cost is stilli in the “gray area.” But the business can use continual price cuts to find the bottom of the gray area, and make the workers take as little as possible.

OTOH, if you start from a condition (strike) where the workers are NOT available, you will usually end up close to the maximum wage the business is willing to pay. The workers can use continuous strikes to find the top of the gray area and make the business pay as much as possible.

What I am asking you is this:
You are claiming that the low-pay condition is the only “valid” price.

Why?

Again, thank you for your thoughtfulness, and there’s a lot to respond to. I can’t spend a lot of time on the baord right now (I hope to later), but I did want to respond to this:

“It’s classist (obviously, as there’s a pay differential.) ”

You’re right, of course. It’s classist.

I think, because of the ways that class and race are entwined, that the assumption in question also functions within the framework of the society to support racism. (and conversely that racism functions to support the assumptions about whose work is important)… so I think the two are entangled on this issue.

But class is probably the more important thing to talk about here, especially since the discussion started by being about class. The connections to race are present, I believe, but perhaps less central.

As the price of labor is the price laborers get paid, it makes a great deal of sense for laborers to organize and force a higher price (up to the effective value of their labor). It also makes sense for laborers to try to do an end run around the direct negotiations by getting government regulation to force a minimum price (to prevent unorganized laborers from undercutting the negotiated price). One way to work towards getting those results is to make popular appeals to the injustice of the price that results from negotiations involving unregulated and unorganized labor.

There is nothing that assures that the magic of the unregulated market place will produce a labor price that will be viewed as just. The morality of wages is at a tangent to the market mechanisms that produce those labor prices. Social solidarity (both among the specific group of workers and among society in general) has a huge influence on what people will feel is a just wage.

Obviously, Y wants to pay the minimum (unless Y accepts that there is also a social obligation component to her actions, in which case, she may choose to pay the minimum she believes is reasonable), but that doesn’t mean that society as a whole should conspire to help her achieve that goal. This is particularly true since paying the minimum will frequently involve externalizing costs (e.g. the government has to provide welfare support to make up the difference between what Y pays X and what the larger society feels is required to meet X’s minimum legitimate needs). Whether it is better to externalize those costs or not is a difficult question (higher wages vs. higher earned income tax credit), but it is important to recognize them.

You seem to be claiming there’s an inherent superiority, and I’m asking you to explain that.

It is possible my boss would pay me $1000 more. It is possible I would do the same work for $1000 less. What basis do you have for deciding which option would occur on a global scale?

If you are employing people at minimum wage, and they unionize and demand twice that, if you look at your books and decide you’d be better off paying twice what you were paying than you would be losing your work force, which price is the price of labor? Which price is the value of labor to the employer?

The price of the labor is what they get paid. There is no price which is the “value of labor” to me; I can’t put a single number on that value, and in any event that isn’t what I’d end up paying. So who cares what it is?

However, having said that and thought about your point, I don’t think that Y should pay the minimum either. (Robert, care to explain your position?)

What’s to explain? Why shouldn’t Y pay as little as she can (assuming equal quality, etc.)? Does anyone go to the car dealership and say “$17,500 is just not a fair price for this car - it’s worth way more than that. Here’s my check for $20,000.” ?

Charles: You are riffing off the fact that what X is willing to work for may be less than what Y is willing to pay him to do the work. That’s not uncommon in any area–negotiations happen all the time.

I’m not sure where you get the automatic assumption, though, that the result should be “X gets the maximum Y is willing to pay”. However, having said that and thought about your point, I don’t think that Y should pay the minimum either. (Robert, care to explain your position?)

It’s a good issue to have raised. Must think on it some more.

Mandolin Writes:
October 18th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Who tends to be able to have the kinds of positions that we value? Tends to be the economically and culturally priveleged. Who doesn’t? Tends to be the economically and culturally unpriveleged.

That’s a bit of a circular argument but I am well aware that the transition from poor>rich is extraordinarily hard, which I think is part of what you mean.

I don’t know what the ratio of women of color involved in cleaning work is nationally, but I do know that there are heavy stereotypes involved in them being hispanic or non-white immigrants.

I have no idea about the ratios either. And I know nonwhites face discrimination, though are you saying it’s somehow worse for cleaners…?

I (and I assume Maia, though possibly not, of course, I don’t speak for her) start with an assumption that cleaning work is hard. It may not be skilled, but I (and perhaps Maia) reject the idea that skill must necessarily be the primary criteria for deciding whose work is valuable.

I don’t think skill needs to necessarily be the primary criteria. But I think a discussion of work product value that excludes skill and required training is problematic.

Whose position in the world is supported by the idea that skilled labor is de facto better than unskilled labor (unless that skilled labor is primarily seen as women’s work; for instance, teaching is less valued than law)?

Whose position? The skilled people. And the people who are working to become the skilled people. (and you noted, I hope, that teaching was one of my specific examples for underpaid people.)

Who overwhelmingly holds those positions?

People who go through fairly expensive and/or lengthy training. THAT is a lot of what makes skilled positions so highly paid. Of course, one can also go through on the job training. Artists can make lots of money with almost no training, if they’re good.

Not incidentally, many of those skilled positions don’t necessarily end up being moneybags. I would almost certainly be richer right now if I had started work at 18 and was now a carpenter with some decades of experience. (I did the workup once). I’ll eventually pass him, but not for a while. Make that carpenter a plumber, and I’ll probably ever catch up.

Who’s left out of this picture?
Whose work is being marked as less valuable?

the unskilled folks. Who are, usually, also poor. I’m ont sure, however, the %age who aren’t white, as you seem to be implying.

Take the same argument and apply it to fruit-picking. Arduous, unskilled labor. Would you argue that fruit-pickers do not deserve to be paid more than the pittances they are? Would you argue that they don’t deserve more than minimum wage?

Well, there’s some point at which is it no longer economically viable to grow fruit. I don’t know what that point is. I also confess I don’t know what they get paid.

But it is a tricky thing, this “deserve” issue. Especially if one elects to apply it to immigrant fruit pickers. How much would they be paid somewhere else? How much does a fruit picker get paid outside of the U.S.? If you want to talk about “living wage” do you consider the different

If so, why? Why would you assume their work is any less valuable than your contribution to society?

In this current world? I don’t know. Mostly because I’ve been told it is. And because I get paid more. And also because it my job happens to be scarcer and somewhat more difficult to do.

However, I’m not some idiot that thinks lawyering has anything other than the value assigned by society. As professions go, it’s probably one with some of the least intrinsic value. (maybe the negotiation and mediation stuff is “worth” something, but not much). You can’t eat it, you can’t wear it, you can’t sell it. It’s worthless unless we say it’s worth something.

Right now, we don’t place enormous priority on certain skill sets like, say, the ability to hunt game. But obviously we USED to. And we still do in many areas of the world. But we place value on lawyering. I don’t really know how to articulate why I think that’s both not exactly OK and yet normal enough to be OK.

And do you see why that’s at heart a racist assumption?

No. I’ll say this: I can understand your point, and I see why you think that, and I think you are basing it on reasonable assumptions, and I don’t think you are insane. I just disagree.

People have been paying less for unskilled labor for a long, long, time. Much of that time a lot of the focus on unskilled labor was the lower classes, not other races. The definition of “skilled” has changed, but still: for a long, long, time. It’s classist (obviously, as there’s a pay differential.)

Picking grain and washing dishes have been low-status and low-pay jobs since there were people to do them. I’m not going to buy into a revised scheme in which considerering a scullery dishwasher’s work as “less valuable” than an innowner is all of a sudden racist.

Which is why prices only ever fluctuate in direct proportion to inflation.

If we up the price, at some point you will choose to do without. The point just before that value is how much you value the thing being sold. Merely because my need to sell means I’ll sell way below that price doesn’t mean that value doesn’t exist. If you are employing people at minimum wage, and they unionize and demand twice that, if you look at your books and decide you’d be better off paying twice what you were paying than you would be losing your work force, which price is the price of labor? Which price is the value of labor to the employer?

Nah. There’s price, and that’s it.

People don’t pay what your labor is worth, they pay the minimum amount that they can to get your (or equivalent) labor. We can only determine what your labor is worth by pushing that minimum amount until they are unwilling to pay any more.

Labor organizing and pushing for pro-labor regulation are ways of pushing up the floor of the price of labor to something closer to the worth of the labor.

If you’d still hire an office cleaner even if it cost $30 an hour, but you can get one for $6 and hour, the worth of the labor is $30/hr, but the price is $6/hr. Over abundance of workers available for a particular job pushes down the price of the labor, but it doesn’t push down the worth.

No, it doesn’t.

The system itself does not assign values. People assign values. The capitalist system, under which we all live, allows people to set their own valuations on what they will pay for the labor of others. The capitalist system permits the more-or-less transparent passthrough of individual value choices - so that the valuation people place on things may change over time, leading to changes in wage rates for particular jobs without any change in the moral status of the people doing those jobs. That would not be possible if the system itself were imposing preferences.

Why would you assume their work is any less valuable than your contribution to society?

Because people who are free to pay whatever they think the work is worth have historically bid for my labor at rates higher than they have bid for the labor of the fruit picker, without being coerced or defrauded into doing so. I am not thus making an assumption - I am making an observation of an empirical reality.

The connection seems perfectly obvious to me.

The Capitalist system, under which we all live, yadda yadda, values certain kinds of labor more than others. Said value is expressed monetarily, which would be one reason why we see phrasing like the example above: “Why should people be paid more than THEY’RE WORTH?”

(Not that I don’t appreciate the clarification of intent, but I think the fact that a semantic condense between what “people are worth” and what “people’s labor is worth” points to the fact that, at some level, our culture perceives these two things to be the same.)

Who tends to be able to have the kinds of positions that we value? Tends to be the economically and culturally priveleged. Who doesn’t? Tends to be the economically and culturally unpriveleged.

I don’t know what the ratio of women of color involved in cleaning work is nationally, but I do know that there are heavy stereotypes involved in them being hispanic or non-white immigrants.

I (and I assume Maia, though possibly not, of course, I don’t speak for her) start with an assumption that cleaning work is hard. It may not be skilled, but I (and perhaps Maia) reject the idea that skill must necessarily be the primary criteria for deciding whose work is valuable.

Whose position in the world is supported by the idea that skilled labor is de facto better than unskilled labor (unless that skilled labor is primarily seen as women’s work; for instance, teaching is less valued than law)?

Who overwhelmingly holds those positions?

Who’s left out of this picture?

Whose work is being marked as less valuable?

Take the same argument and apply it to fruit-picking. Arduous, unskilled labor. Would you argue that fruit-pickers do not deserve to be paid more than the pittances they are? Would you argue that they don’t deserve more than minimum wage?

If so, why? Why would you assume their work is any less valuable than your contribution to society?

And do you see why that’s at heart a racist assumption?

Try to dial a bit back on the condescension. I speak as ersatz temporary substitute mod.

Maia mentions that she had problems with the campaign that this protest supports because the campaign has unclear principles. By this, I assume she means that it isn’t well organized to effectively support collective action. Maia’s been pretty clear on what she believes is the effective method for fighting economic oppression under capitalism: collective action.

The ability of labor to use collective action to directly (collective bargaining) and indirectly (through getting government regulation) improve bargaining position and wages is the aspect of the market that you, Robert, and Brandon Berg seem to be ignoring. That is what this protest was in support of. It isn’t pie in the sky when we die wishing that cleaners could be paid better, it is part of an active struggle to force employers and contractors to pay better wages.

Maia Writes:
October 17th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
I knew this was going to happen. I didn’t want to publish this post, because I knew that as soon as I did a whole lot of well off white men would come along and denigrate the work and value of non-white women. I hated knowing that I was going to give people this opportunity.

Us too. I suspected as soon as I posted my response and read the responses of others, that at least one person (I thought it might be you) would engage in some idiotic ad hom and suggest that someone’s position was inaccurate because of their wealth. I confess I didn’t expect the veiled racism accusations (how is that even relevant at ALL?) but thanks for the surprise.

Most people can learn to clean, but most people can learn to do a lot of jobs.

There are very few jobs which require the level of “learning” and investment in learning as is required to clean things. This is presumably fairly obvious because most of us know how to clean things, just like most of us know how to wash dishes. Of course one becomes a somewhat faster cleaner if one does it as a profession, but the entry into the profession is minimal.

There’s also a secondary question, if you’re right: If cleaning is lower paid than most jobs, and if other jobs are just as easy to learn, one might wonder why anyone would work as a cleaner.

It’s physically exhausting work, done at speed, and there is skill to learn.

I agree with your first two points. But as I only clean recreationally, maybe I’m missing something about the third. Can you explain some of the skills which are required to clean as a profession, which most people don’t already possess?

(Random info: Where I live, cleaning is mostly private and goes for $15-20/hour.)

Are you talking about corporate cleaning or home cleaning? When you say private do you mean it’s done by individuals or is subcontracted by a cleaning company. Are you talking about what people pay or what they are paid?

Individuals, mostly. Though there may be some small cleaning “groups” of 3-4 employees. Much of it is under the table.

please remember that I am anti-capitalist - explaing that it has to work under capitalism doesn’t really matter to me.

Here, at least, we live in a capatalist society. most 1st world economies are at least somewhat (if not very) capatalist. This is an…. interesting… view. Sort of like developing a view of how to improve womens’ lots but neglecting to mention that the process won’t work under patriarchy.

Combined with your earlier post I’m a bit confused. Are you looking for what are commonly called “real world” applications? These tend to require working within the system to change it? Or are you abstract theoretical land?

My interpretation is that Maia’s saying that, under a capitalist system, the amount of money allotted for labor equates to respect and regard. She says that cleaning people deserve more respect and regard.

I think you’re condensing her personal opinions about a future world, her opinions about the way things exist in the here and now, and her acknowledgement of how the system of capitalism actually works.

I have a friend who lives in an anarchist co-op where the people’s contribution to the house is given in terms of hours rather than absolute dollar amounts. People who work at high power jobs pay the same number of hour’s wages as people who don’t.

The rubric they’ve decided to use is that it’s not skill or non-skill which should determine the worth of people’s labor. They say everyone’s time should be equally respected.

(If you could adjust that for time effort, that would probably be helpful. However, I remain unconvinced that skill or lack thereof is a good way to adjust for effort. Do I really work harder when I’m preparing a college class curiculum than a cleaning woman does scrubbing a bathroom? My intellectual engagement is higher, but I don’t have to deal with crushing boredom.)