Newsletter No. 28
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2005
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How casual, hourly-rate jobs work for the boss ‘The unit measure for time-wages, the price of the working-hour, is the quotient of the value of a day’s labour, divided by the number of hours in the average working day’ [the value of a day’s labour-power is the daily cost of maintaining/ reproducing the labourer’s life]. ‘If the labourer is employed less than the full day (or less than the number of days in a work-week) he only gets a proportion of the day’s (or week’s) value of labour. ‘If the hour’s wage is fixed so the capitalist does not bind himself to pay a day’s wage ... but only to pay wages for the hours during which he chooses to employ the labourer, he can employ him for a shorter time than that which is originally the basis of the calculation of the hour-wage, or the unit-measure of the price of labour … ‘The connection between the paid and the unpaid labour (ie, the cost of a day’s labour and the value it produces for the employer) is destroyed. The capitalist can now wring from the labour a certain quantity of surplus-labour without allowing him the labour-time necessary for his own subsistence. ‘He can annihilate all regularity of employment, and … make the most enormous over-work alternate with relative or absolute cessation of work. He can, under pretense of paying "the normal price of labour” abnormally lengthen the work-day with no corresponding compensation to the labourer’ (Karl Marx: Capital I, Part 6) Marx goes on to say that only the ‘legal limitation of the work-day puts an end to such mischief’, but this is what ‘deregulation’ and ‘flexibilisation’ via individual contracts and strangling of unions sets out to get rid of. An era of productivity growth with no corresponding reduction of the average working day created this opportunity, which let employers make a ‘normal profit’ quicker and created an ‘oversupply’ of labour, that weakened its bargaining position and accelerated the erosion of rights and conditions. |