Service economies rely on wage suppression because productivity gains are limited

Evidence

I spoke to a cashier at the chain store the Dollar Tree in Tulsa who is homeless. She makes nine dollars an hour, and she can work only twenty hours per week because the Dollar Tree limits employee hours to avoid paying benefits. Especially in societies where the economy is increasingly based on the service sector, where there is little room for investment in technological development to increase labor productivity, suppressing wages remains the dominant strategy to increase the rate of exploitation. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 116

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why do service sectors have ‘little room’ for productivity investment — is this structural or a choice about how services are organized?
• XREF: connects to: Service industries can extract surplus value and prolong capitalism’s viability — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 132; Global wage suppression was engineered to boost dollar profit rates — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 199; Union decline cannot be blamed mainly on industrial-to-service economic shifts — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 265