Employers can only buy workers’ time, never their effort
Evidence
One may protest that there is many a factory populated by uninspired, joyless, robotic workers producing tin cans or gadgets worth more than the cost of paying the workers. True. But this happens only because employers cannot buy the effort put in by unskilled, manual labourers. They can only buy their time, during which to pressurise them, in a variety of ways, to work hard and to sweat. The point here is that this blue-collar sweat, exactly like the waged architect’s flair, can never be directly bought or sold. This is, indeed, the secret power of employers: to extract any surplus, either from highly skilled or from uninspired, repetitive, robotic work, they must pay for their workers’ time (commodity labour) but cannot actually buy their sweat or flair (experiential labour). — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 72
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Extends and defends the commodity vs experiential labour distinction against a common objection (robotic factory work).