What do highly-paid workers have that the rest of us don’t? (besides money)
In the course of the last few posts on this blog, we have dived into the value created by workers, and where that value ends up going. Long story short, the average worker creates $78 of value per hour. We might imagine this to be an abuse of the word “average”: if the value people create is identical with their pay, the average person creating $78/hr just means that there are some people who create $10,129 in value per hour (if you make $18M/yr, like the average member of the top 0.01%), and some people who create only $7.25 per hour (federal minimum wage). That’s about the same scale difference as that in size between the a gerbil (0.15 – 0.26 lbs) and a human being (150–300 lbs). If their income is taken to be a representation of their “skill,” a minimum-wage earner in the US is basically a rodent compared to someone at the top. Our sense of decency compels us to ask, does that really make sense? While there are exceptions, the average member of the 1% has neither significant inherent talent, an exceptionally difficult job, or any material consequences for failure (one need only look up the phenomenon we call the Golden Parachute — where failing executives are given millions of dollars as they’re being forced out after running a company into the ground).
In a classical Marxist framework, surplus-value is the difference between the value the workers create (the average wage, $78/hr) and the value they are paid (down to about $10/hr). Profit is merely this unpaid value of worker labor, repackaged as free value which arises “spontaneously.” This surplus-value might escape the firm to the “investors,” or it might remain in-house and simply drift upwards to the better paid management, executive, or professional class — it should be counted as exploitation either way. If all workers create the same value per hour, then exploitation is quite easy to understand. You would be exploited if you make less than $78/hr (around 2/3 of the population), and an exploiter if you make more (which is around 1/3 of the population, including “returns on investment” as a kind of wage).
But it is quite an assumption to say all workers create the same value — can we justify it? We need to take on the question, “Are all jobs basically equal, or do some jobs create more value than others?” There are two aspects here which should be disentangled.
First, I can accept that not all workers are equally good at the work they do. If I am a baker, but make insufficiently careful measurements and my goods are inedible garbage half the time, I am not creating as much value as a good baker. Due to reasons of experience, temperament, level of interest, or talent, (among others), any two individuals may well not create the same value, whether working the same job or different ones. In this essay we are not discussing equality in this aspect at all, but focusing on discrepancies between different kinds of jobs. If someone does not have an average competency at their work, they create less than a normal amount of value, and should be seeking out some other work, or possibly (if they insist on continuing) be paid less.
Instead, let us assume for each occupation, we are discussing a worker of average competency in that occupation. In this case, we want to know, “Does one kind of labor create more value than another?” Put another way, does “skilled labor” really exist as something distinct from “unskilled labor?”¹ The difficulty is in determining whether two dissimilar jobs can be quantitatively compared in any manner except by their pay; since we believe pay differences could reflect exploitation, instead of reflecting different real value creation, that cannot be taken as evidence. Part of the problem is that many concepts are being conflated into one when we ask this question. Let us probe this in more depth — what do we mean by “skilled labor?”
In my view, there are four different concepts which we presume to be aspects of “skilled labor” — exceptionally talented workers, highly educated and trained workers, workers who do tasks which are especially difficult, and workers who do work which our society thinks is important. What I want to do in this piece is explore each of these aspects in turn, to examine if there is any merit to the claim that “skilled” labor necessarily creates (and thus ought to be paid) more value than “unskilled” labor. I also intend to emphasize that these four aspects, while possibly linked, are in no way interchangeable facets of a single thing, but rather all separate claims and concerns. Ultimately while there may be some basis to the notion of higher-value workers, it is a minor effect at most, and those occupations which might create more value are generally not the ones paid above the average in the current system.
This is a break with orthodox Marxism, which holds “skill” to be real and the value-difference relatively wide, but think this whole issue is just not especially important compared to the conflict between capital and labor; we will explore this disagreement further in future work. What we show here is that if there is any reality behind different kinds of labor generating different amounts of value, we should posit it as minor fluctuations around the baseline assumption that human labors are generally equal, instead of proceeding from the radical starting point that some workers are like human beings, while others are more like gerbils.
Definition 1: “Talented Individuals”
One might suppose that the value of a job depends on how difficult it is to find people qualified to fill it. After all, different jobs require different things from people, and different people have naturally different characteristics and temperaments. “Intelligence” is the most famous (and, there is plenty of reason to critique this notion), but also useful are patience, decisiveness, charisma, physical strength, and all sorts of other qualities.
If some occupations create value above the average because the required traits and talents make them “skilled,” it means certain attributes are more valuable than others. It’s worth asking, which ones? If I am talented at dealing with elementary-school kids, but not at solving equations, am I “skilled” in some way that deserves recognition, or “unskilled” and deserve scorn? If I have a hard time remaining diplomatic in the face of demands from entitled consumers, but can memorize a dense legal text, am I “more valuable” than someone who has the opposite traits? (Generally, the skills we find are “valuable” ones are stereotypically male and upper-class.)
This value is not derived in principle from scarcity of skills. The “rarity” of different skills are rarely tracked, and when they are it is only of the ones we already chose to be “skilled” in the first place. For example, we don’t really know or care how many people remain healthy and focused through long periods of sitting in one spot, maintaining vigilance on a barely-changing landscape — even through that would make them good long-haul truckers. It is also not derived from valuing “good” traits over “bad” ones; at least, not consistently. In some fields, endurance to carry on with a difficult task for a long time is admirable, while in others, becoming easily bored might spur workers to automate or otherwise streamline tasks.² Which of these is better in the abstract is really not clear — it depends on circumstances. We want to believe that we think of certain jobs as “skilled labor” because those who are good at them are more talented people, but we defined “skilled” and “talented” practically in reverse: some people’s talents and dispositions are considered “more skilled” than others when they are suited to what we already decided was “skilled labor.”
What if we were to care equally about whether menial and manual laborers were as “talented” at their jobs as we do about whether upper-middle class professionals are talented at theirs? We would find that every worker has to fake some of the “talents” which their job requires, has to work on cultivating others, and still others are discovered within themselves after they start. To put it mildly, this is the beauty of human society — people seek out tasks which are amenable to their individual dispositions. The pay difference between “skilled” and “unskilled” labor, rather than rewarding “better” dispositions, on the contrary is an absolute disincentive to people finding work to which they are suited. Instead, you have to quit jobs which pay terribly, even if you feel they are right for you, and cram your soul into an ill-fitting box to get a job which pays your bills, even if you hate it.
Of course, we’re not just acquiescing to everyone’s self-identified “talents” (so no, socialism isn’t when everyone who wants to be a rock star has their terrible music subsidized). It is still necessary that people do things which others actually find useful. But any “useful” job can be linked with human traits which are resonant with it, and those should all be celebrated (meaning, paid appropriately) — not just talents traditionally assumed to be concentrated in well-paid male professionals.
Definition 2: “Training and Education”
However, “talent” is not the only barrier to entry which makes some positions “harder to fill.” In some industries, people also need to put in preparation: spending a lot of time and money getting education and certifications, for example. If we pay somebody with significant credentials the same as an “unskilled” laborer, are we not saying that education doesn’t matter? Let us take the medical doctor as an example of a professional of this type. They are chosen primarily because reactionary trolls seem unable to shut up about them, but the same goes for any profession which requires substantial training: engineering, computer programming, law, academia, etc. One might say, “We need doctors, and they need to spend 20 years at medical school to be competent. If after all that, we pay them the same as fry cooks, no one will be willing to become a doctor.”
It is true that this aspect of “skilled labor” is inextricably tied up with the question of education. If doctors had to go into horrific debt and spend 20 years in poverty, only to be rewarded with the same pay they could have gotten by not doing those things, then we will have a shortage of people willing to become doctors. That’s why we’re proposing revolutionary change here, not tinkering with one aspect of the system at a time. Under socialism, education, especially higher education which serves as training for advanced careers, must be free. Indeed, people must be paid to undergo training and career-based higher education, and paid at a rate similar to the pay of the job itself — because in a very real sense, it is part of the job. We don’t have to imagine that being a doctor, as a career, suddenly begins when you start doing procedures on real patients. On the contrary, it begins when you take a grueling courseload in pre-medical studies in undergrad, and then continues throughout medical school and residency, and then into opening a practice, becoming a specialist, and so on.
Really, what is lost when you approach it this way? Is there a surplus of naive kids who will suck up resources being trained as doctors, only to (selfishly?) flunk out and choose something else? Schools can still maintain a rigorous admissions process, and failure can still come with consequences — getting kicked out, etc. Students are contributing to society (by being trained as doctors), and so they ought to be able to afford to buy food, shelter, entertainment, etc. If they drop out, they drop out. C’est la vie.
In Socialism, jobs which require skills that can only be acquired through education and training will continue to exist, and we are not proposing to lower the standards needed to “pass” this barrier. But this preparation doesn’t fall “outside the boundaries” of the job itself — the system wants you to think education is when you work for some time “on yourself” for free (or more often, for an exorbitant price), until you become the kind of person who is qualified for jobs which are objectively skilled. On the contrary, we will say one becomes a doctor when they are admitted to a program which trains doctors; they are merely an early-career one who does not yet have the credentials to see patients. Instead of working on yourself for free while you are a student, you are working at your job, and ought to be paid.
Definition 3: “Intense and Difficult”
Some jobs might instead be considered “skilled labor” not because it is difficult to fill the position, but that it is simply difficult to actually do the job. It is easy to imagine that some jobs take more out of you than others, or on the other hand maybe they feel more rewarding to do and thus recoup, instead of drain, your energy. The more the economy takes out of you (value being something generated by human beings), the more compensation it should award you. It is worth noting that, while it is easy to intellectually believe this is true, this metric requires us to do something problematic: how do we compare the “difficulty” of jobs?
A job can be emotionally, intellectually, or physically exhausting, or all three. Working a domestic violence hotline is intense in a different way than teaching a classroom full of fourth-graders, and in a different way than carrying around multiple heavy bundles of timber into a house foundation. The wide variety of types of labor are united only by their basic human principle — they create value, which is then consumed by the person at the other end of the transaction (the victims, the students, the residents). But which of these three has the highest intensity, i.e. which should be best paid? Could anyone answer that question without sounding like an asshole? I don’t think I could be so presumptuous. Workers’ subjective experiences being not universal make this even more complicated. Some people find creative work fulfilling, some find it exhausting. Some people regain their energy helping others grasp intellectual concepts, others find it incredibly frustrating. This returns to the “talent” argument; enjoying something that most people hate is a talent.
I challenge the reader to describe an unskilled job as “easy,” in a way that a real worker in that job would agree is not out of touch with the reality.
- Fast food is not an “easy” job. Standing up in one place for hours at a time, cleaning human waste off of tables and bathroom tiles, dealing with hot, dangerous equipment, and being forced to prostrate themselves in front of arrogant consumers to try to scrounge up tips are objectively horrible conditions.
- Picking fruits is not an “easy” job. Roaming about in the hot sun with few breaks, constantly bending over in such a way that your back gets strained and may not recover at the end of the day, and getting stung by acids and pesticides which remain on the leaves and fruit.
I have my doubts that there is really any “easy” job, which actually does something useful. (However, pointing out that certain well-paid “bullshit jobs” are in fact pretty easy is always fun.)
Let’s say, purely hypothetically, that there was a job which was necessary, but which no one wanted to do, because everyone knows it is more difficult than others. Maybe it involves working alone, late at night, and being unacknowledged and unappreciated during the day. Maybe it involves picking up the trash of unruly students who hide gum and track dog poop in hard-to-reach nooks and crannies of official buildings. (It’s a janitor. The job I’ve chosen is a janitor.) Now imagine we live in Socialism, every occupation is paid equally well, and now it turns out no one is willing to do this when they could do something else. When a job simply cannot be filled at the average wage, then and only then should we presume it is actually more intense than the rest. Thus, those workers generate more value than others, and need to be paid more than the average. But the jobs which are currently paid at high rates are not like this — instead it seems jobs get easier as you go up the income ladder.
Any upper-middle-class person who believes their job, which pays say ten times minimum wage, is “ten times as hard” as a minimum wage one is shown a liar by this basic point: If they come home from their 40 hours at a desk less exhausted than someone who works the same 40 hours at a high-stress, public-facing retail environment, then they must have gotten the roles reversed. Obviously, their job is easier. If it was harder, they would be the one with less left in the tank.
Definition 4: “Important Work”
Let us pivot one last time. Maybe “skilled labor” doesn’t refer to people who are better than others, or whose jobs are harder to do. Instead, it is merely necessary that we should pay people more to do jobs we find important than jobs which we don’t care about. Value is, after all, social. We believe it matters a lot whether people with key economic roles are good at their jobs, and it doesn’t matter at all whether low-skilled workers are. We are rewarding important roles in society for staying on task and using their powers for good.
The problem here is that the notion of “importance” is not easy to interpret. We don’t really mean people who do work that others benefit from. It was discovered during the early pandemic, of course, that it was in fact low-wage service workers who were “essential” to the functioning of our society, while professionals and managers could smoothly transition online or disappear entirely. David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs identifies, crucially, that the reality is in fact the opposite of this perception.
In our society, there seems to be a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it…[Capitalists] have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against schoolteachers and autoworkers for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “But you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that, you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”
But what the capitalists really mean by importance is something much more insidious. We really treat a job as important when we want to believe its holder is an important person — i.e. upper class. It is a purely circular argument; the upper class is well-paid because they are elites, and they become elites when they are well-paid.
The other distinctions between “skilled” and “unskilled” labor have some ethical logic, though their execution rarely lives up to it. The well-paid, well-educated elites need to justify their bullshit pay, and which explanation they use is just a matter of expediency. But the truth is, this is the aspect they really care we believe anyways. In reality, their pay is high because it is needed to show everyone they are the elites. To show my hand as a Socialist on this point, this distinction doesn’t need to be critiqued so much as simply abolished. No kind of person is more important than another when they contribute to the same collective project, i.e. society.
After examining all four aspects, we do not have enough evidence that the “skills gap” is real. Only one of them (intensity) plausibly makes a job more value-generating, while another (education) needs to be tackled head-on, so it does not need to be a trial of poverty before you “start” a high-value job. Talents should be respected, but this should be extended to all the various skills and talents people have, not merely talents which appeal to the prejudices of bourgeois intellectuals and chauvinists; and “importance” of a job is really just a class status marker, not some real indication of usefulness to society.
In my view, the ethical position is that every socially necessary occupation generates about the same amount of value per person. Economically, there are not substantially different “kinds” of human beings — it is just the social relations we have under capitalism (and patriarchy, nationalism, white supremacy, etc.) which sort nearly-identical humans into antagonistic classes.
A good enough starting point, if you remain skeptical, is at least accepting that the gulf between the value of human workers cannot possibly be as wide as economic inequality suggests, and this value is not distributed to the right people. An adequate set of reforms can be much less far-reaching than total equality: a substantially higher minimum wage, imposition of a new maximum wage, and making education free to all — it is obvious we cannot accept the modern situation of terrible poverty interspersed with obscene decadence, so access to “skilled jobs” must be expanded and the distance between them and “unskilled” ones must be diminished. But I encourage you to let the more radical seed germinate within you, too: if a job is valuable enough to exist and to pay human beings to do it, maybe that, in itself, proves that it contributes the same as any other to the human collective. In other words, we really are all in this together.
Footnotes:
¹ This term surfaced recently in a weird gaffe, where some commenters got upset by NYC Mayor Eric Adams mentioning “low-skilled” workers being affected by the emptying out of Midtown during remote work. This struck me as very bizarre; is the problem merely that he is saying the quiet part out loud? If the claim is that we should respect our low-wage workers, the solution is not to decry officials who call them “derogatory” names like “low-skilled,” and instead to help them organize until their wages are no longer low in the first place.
² This is a reference to a statement by billionaire Bill Gates. He famously said, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
