What is ‘Wage Theft’ Anyway?
Marx’s version of the labor theory of value dramatically solves one of the age-old mysteries of the market (how can anyone make money out of a fair exchange?).
Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital.
Lately, I’ve seen more and more references to the idea of “wage theft”, both in general discussion and in the library world. The basic idea seems to be that the “fair” and normal mode of wage-labour is to be paid for all your labour time, and that wage theft constitutes an irregularity, an aberration that creeps in to this "fair” wage relationship, leading to exploitation and overwork. One common expression of this idea runs something like: if you are working a 40 hour week but you know you’re only being paid for 35 hours, that is wage theft and exploitation. The implication here is that the normal and fair wage relationship is to be paid for 40 hours if you work for 40 hours, and that exploitation only creeps into the wage relationship when that fair and normal condition is violated.
But, and this is the question Marx begins with in Capital, if every exchange is a fair exchange of equivalents, where does the extra money come from that constitutes profit? I don’t want to rehash all of Marx’s argument here, but in various places he destroys alternative ideas (such as that there is no growth, and every profit entails a loss) before setting out his own theory. There are two important aspects of Marx’s argument.
The first is that only human labour-power can produce entirely new use-value, and this new use-value can be exchanged for new exchange-values (e.g. money). Workers produce new value, and if the capitalist can sell that value, then a profit in the form of money is achieved.
The second is that what a worker sells is not their labour (perhaps measured in terms of hours) but their labour-power, their very capacity to work. Labour contracts make it appear as though what is being sold is labour (you agree to work X hours a week for a salary of Y), and it therefore appears as though the wage is directly related to the hours of work provided. It is understandable, then, why workers continue to think that they are “supposed” to be paid for their hours of work and that exploitation is a departure from that.
But what the distinction between labour and labour-power means is that more or less labour power can be extracted without paying for it even if you work the same amount of time. This is also a function of the fact that the wage is not a function of the hours worked (though it appears that way in contracts) but is rather a function of what workers need to survive and reproduce themselves (including ideological, cultural, and class reproduction which I’ll touch on a minute).
What is important to bear in mind here is that because the capitalist is buying labour power, not a certain amount of labour, the amount of actual labour the capitalist receives can fluctuate, and surplus value (which gets turned into profit) depends on the proportion of paid to unpaid labour. Wages tend towards the minimum required to reproduce the working class, and can be lowered, for example, due to cheapening of consumer goods. Or the working day can be extended, and due to the distinction between wage and labour, wages could even go up (e.g. through overtime) so long as unpaid-labour increases in proportion to the paid-labour. Marx called the surplus-value produced in this way “absolute surplus value”, and Chapter 10 of Capital is a masterly reconstruction of the struggles over the length of the working day in the 18th and 19th centuries.
But there is another way the capitalist can get more labour about of the same amount of labour-power (remembering that it is labour-power the capitalist pays for, not labour). By increasing the productivity of the labour process - through the division of labour, for example, or through automation - more work is performed for the same amount of human-labour power expended. This Marx’s calls relative surplus value, and is at the heart of capitalist development.
Because profit only arises out of the appropriation of labour, all workers experience “wage theft” all the time, to a greater or lesser extent. Focusing on wage theft as an aberration has, therefore, the paradoxical outcome of lending legitimacy to the “normal” exploitation of the wage-capital relationship. This is why Marx’s insight - that what a worker sells is not their labour but their capacity for labour - is so important. It enables us to cut through the mystification of capital’s picture of what goes on, represented, for example, in labour contracts.
“Wage theft”, exploitation, burnout, are not irregular aberrations that mar an otherwise fair and just labour relationship. Burnout, overwork, austerity, etc, are not problems with an organization’s or profession’s “culture”; rather they are part of the material mechanism for the extraction of surplus value. Making this an issue of culture comes close to (philosophical) idealism for me: if we just choose to improve our culture then exploitation will go away. There are many cultural issues we need to tackle, but we need to recognize when they are superstructural expressions of an economic necessity: the necessity to constantly increase the rate of profit.
This is hard for those of us who work in universities or municipalities to get our heads around, because our organizations are ostensibly not about making profit. However, even if that were the case (and I deny that it is anymore) the way non-profit organizations function in a mode of production based on private profit is the same as any other. This indeed is a cultural issue, but it is the issue of the cultural hegemony of the logic of capital over any thing it touches.
And I should mention why some wages are obviously much higher than means of subsistence. Prior to the neoliberal period, and most especially in the capitalist hey-day of the 18th and 19th centuries, before the reduction of the world into only two economic classes was achieved, there were many people in society who were neither capitalists nor workers, and who were paid for out of the capitalist’s share of profits. These were priests, teachers, foremen, university professors, doctors, engineers, etc, etc - all the “professions” who performed socially valuable labour but were outside the wage-capital relationship. A lot of this socially valuable labour was in the area of intellectual and cultural work. Priests and teachers, for example, played a vital role in the training and disciplining of workers from generation to generation.
Over time these professions too have become gradually proletarianized (thought they often don’t recognize it), but they have a) been accustomed to higher wages than workers due to their privileged (“professional”) positions in earlier forms of capitalism and b) continue to perform the culturally and ideologically reproductive roles they did in the older societies. When our payment for this work became shifted to wage-payment in the 20th century, our wages started out high because of the historical background to our professional positions. What we are seeing now is the end-result of our proletarianization, our conversion from “parasites” on capitalist production to actual workers. Proletarianization has made us subject to the logic of relative and absolute surplus-value, hence precarity, burnout, casualization, lowering of wages, destruction of benefits, etc, etc. Our privileged professional position within capitalism is being attacked and we have become, in a sense, real workers.
This still comes as a shock to many, as the discourse around open-plan offices for faculty members made the rounds on the weekend, Academics are shocked that they should be treated like every other wage-worker. Unfortunately, this too serves a social purpose, as it maintains the privileged idea of academic work over other kinds of work, and therefore fractures any possible solidarity between academics and other workers.
We can’t resist our own proletarianization by complaining about what’s unfair, or not fitting the dignity and importance of our work. Rather we have to join with all the other workers who have been in this position for 300 years. We have to learn from their strategies and their tactics, their means of organization (which have hitherto not been our means of organization), and we have to understand the subtle mechanisms of our exploitation. Talking about “wage theft”, in my view, doesn’t help with any of that, but continues to support the idea that “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage” is the norm; an illusion most workers dispensed with long ago, if indeed they ever subscribed to it in the first place.