The employing class counts on there being competition amongst the employed. If the poor fight each other they won’t fight the rich. This is most immediately shown in the competition for jobs. It’s common to witness projections of the amount of jobs created recently, but it is never intended that every human being be employed. If everyone had a job, there wouldn’t be any bottom feeders. It would be an economy of successful people all demanding raises at the same time. Someone always has to be losing; be fighting for a job, for capitalism to work.
An increasingly common, and less obvious, conflict between the employed is a struggle to be employed at a better job than another person. What is considered a good, or bad job, is only the agreement of popular entertainment, academia and general delusion. Our economy is decidedly tailored towards the consumer. As a result, most jobs are in the service industry. Despite this being the most common type of job, and one that everyone counts on, it is a “bad” job. Because it is considered a “bad” job, the wages remain low. The employing class therefore has a vested interest in continuing this image of a “bad” job.
Not that their white-collar brothers and sisters have it much better. They have a “good” job, where they get paid nominally more, but still far less than the profit created from their labor. They are also victims, only kept complacent by feeling superior to the employee that “serves” them. This “service”, by way of another part of the employed class, is only skin-deep. All of the aforementioned employees, wether they be employed to a chain grocery store, a local privately owned restaurant, or an advertisement firm, are all owned. They are human capital, entirely divorced from ownership of the products or results of their labor, and at the mercy of how the employing class chooses to compensate them.
The wages are different, I agree. I suggest you look deeper. The difference between 7K and 70K a year is absolutely nothing compared to 7K and 70K against the value of ownership. Whether it’s the local restauranteur making $400,000 at his restaurant without personal labor, or an insurance firm raking in billions for the C.E.O. who plays golf, the employee is robbed. The comparatively tiny variations between the living standards of blue collar and white collar worker needs to be ignored in lieu of the struggle against the employer. Work together. The struggle is not you against your boss, but you and your boss against the boss you’ll never see.
1 comment:
The reason why people aren't paid well in "bad" jobs isn't because they are "bad", it's because it is easy to get into them. Serving food at a McDonalds is an easy job, and therefore it pays less than a harder job. If Joe Frycook wanted a raise, management would tell him to fuck himself, and that he could be replaced in a jiffy (which is true).
Garbage men, one could argue, is a bad job. You hang around trash all day, and nobody really wants to do it. But because nobody wants to do it, they are paid a much higher salary than a frycook.
A small wage definitely makes the job worse, but I don't think it's fair to say they aren't paid well because they aren't supposed to be. Sucky jobs can pay great, as long as you're the only guy that'll do em.
You are right though. There's too much money going to the top without the top producing very much. That's hopefully going to change soon.
-Lance
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