| This question <562|132> overall <73|75> Darci: <72|75>. |
| Question 61: Does skilled labor produce more value per hour than unskilled labor? Explain! |
| [74] Darci: If one looks at value as the reflection of amount of labor, skilled labor and unskilled labor value can only be measured by the amount of time spent in production. If viewed only from this perspective then the answer to the question is it depends on the individual. The laborer who spends the most time producing has more value and skill level is inconsequential. If one believes value is exchange value then a skilled laborer's hours (i.e. computer programmer) would be of more value to a business firm who relies on computers for their production than the janitor who cleans the building, because the product is dependent on a specific skill and not on a clean work area. Both have their place and it would be difficult to work in a filthy environment, but production levels do not cease because of garbage but work does cease if the computer cannot function or programs to perform business tasks are not written. So the answer to this question is it depends. |
| Hans: Marx, in the assigned readings, purports to derive that exchange value comes from labor, and then goes on to reason that in its value-creating capacity all labor is equal. You are coming to a different conclusion. You say that skilled laborers contribute more to exchange value than unskilled laborers. Did you just prove Marx wrong? |
| [74] Darci: (datestring)Sun, 22 Jan 95 19:57:42 MST(/datestring) My answer was trying to discover if there is a way to determine if skilled labor is more valuable than unskilled -- my intention was to explore the possibility that labor-value is socially unequal depending on the exchange value and urgency of the need. Am I getting close? |
| Hans: You mean, that someone who produces something that is in need, or someone who has high skills, produces more value? |
| These are two different questions. First look at the urgency of the need, i.e., take someone who produces something which has a high exchange value because everybody wants it. Does this mean he is also producing more value? I would argue no. Determining value by exchange value is putting the cart in front of the horse. The producer of the good that is in demand gets more money not because he creates more value but because there is a flow of value from elsewhere in society to him. |
| Here is why. Something has value because it represents a piece of the labor power available to society. The total labor power is still the same as before this producer hit the goldmine of offering something that sells like crazy. Therefore the sum of values is also the same. In the long run, other producers will jump in and produce the same commodity, until supply has caught up with demand. Then the market prices will again gravitate around the actual values. |
| This depends on the assumption that the supplier we speak of uses “abstract labor”, i.e., basically labor which the majority of the people in society can do. If you are talking about someone, call him Albert, who has exceptional skills which others in society cannot readily reproduce, then the matter becomes more tricky. I tried to explain this situation between Questions 59 and 60 in the Annotations. (I am referring to Question numbers instead of page numbers, because the page numbers differ between the English-only and the bilingual edition, but the Question numbers don't.) On the market, people act as if all labor powers were equal (by setting the products of these labor powers equal through the exchange), but in reality, they are not. In this case Marx seems to say the qualitative differences between these labor powers must somehow be reduced to quantitative differences, but there is no general law how this will be done. It will depend on demand and supply. Yes, it is an important aspect of Marx's theory that not everything in the economy is determined by economic laws, there is leeway where one has to say, as you said above: “it depends.” Two other prominent examples where “it depends” are the length of the working day (see Chapter Ten) and the interest rate. |
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