My favorite hobby is describing socialism without using the word “socialism” and watching everyone in the room agree with me.
Guy at work: *bitches about work*
Me: “Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes. See, the company can only make money off of the work we do, so they’re never gonna pay us what we’re worth; you don’t get paid for eight hours’ work, you get paid for working eight hours. That’s how they make bank. So the relationship between us and management is always gonna be adversarial. Why you think [boss] is such a dickhead? He’s incentivized to be a dickhead.”
Guy: “That….that actually makes a lot of sense.”
Me: *stares into the camera like on The Office while ‘The Internationale’ plays in the background*
i don’t understand the difference between getting “paid for eight hours’ work” vs “paid for 8 hours.”
Most companies want you to do 12 hours worth of work in 6 hours of actual time. They want to work you so hard your stress level is through the roof. So then you go to the doctor for various illnesses caused by excessive stress. Then you get to add to that stress by worrying about missing too much time from work to take care of the problems that work created in your body.
That makes sense now, thank you!
The company makes its profits via the additional value your work adds to their product or service. A sewn shirt is more valuable than three yards of fabric, for instance, and a chair is worth more than a few bits of wood, and so on; but for the commodity to reach that market value so much higher than its components requires labor.
So, your employer is not actually paying you an equivalent value for what your labor generates; that’s where their profit comes from. All they’re paying you for is your labor-power exerted over a certain amount of time per day. With modern industrial practices, your employer easily makes back your daily wage in added value within the first few hours of your working day; the whole rest of that time you spend generating profit.
You don’t get paid for eight hours’ work, you get paid for working eight hours.
“[…] your employer easily makes back your daily wage in added value within
the first few hours of your working day; the whole rest of that time you
spend generating profit.“
another way to explain it is say you get paid $10 an hour to run a machine that makes 10 shirts an hour. (btw, even if you say that it’s technically the machine that is making the shirts, it still needs someone there to make it run, so i don’t really see how this is meaningfully different from trying to say that it’s technically the loom making the fabric rather than the person working at the loom.) each shirt is made with $1 worth of materials, and is sold for $5. when you run the math that means that you are being paid $1/shirt while the company makes $4/shirt. so who is getting those extra $3/shirt and why? you are being paid $80 for working 8 hours, but your 8 hours of work was effectively worth $320 since that is how much profit was made off of your work.
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Marshmellowmilktea 