Dork Lard:
So it’s hard for anyone to claim it takes a certain skill or talent to drive a lorry. Anyone can become a lorry driver.
Just because anyone can do a particular task, does not mean that those actually doing a particular task should go underpaid (or even unpaid, at the logical conclusion).
Almost anyone can wash my car, for example - including myself. It doesn’t mean car-washers should be press-ganged into forced labour and paid nothing, because “anybody can wash cars” (so say those who are not actually washing their own cars, but are expecting someone else to do it for a pittance). If you want your car washed by somebody else, you pay that man a wage to live.
Nor does it mean that highly specialist roles should be overpaid (or even consume the entirety of the proceeds of a collective endeavour). There is a difference between making an extra payment to recognise the particular stress, risk, or unpleasantness of a particular role, and gratuitous overpayment based on something else entirely (like exploitation or extortion).
If CEOs needed to be paid so much more than the lowest paid worker, then how on earth were CEOs ever motivated to work in the past, and how do other countries (which are either poorer, or simply more economically equal) motivate their senior managers to work on much less?
The transport industries wages are defined by the laws of economics, namely the law of ‘supply & demand’.
The difference is that a “law of economics” is not remotely the same as the laws of physics (to which the phrase is designed to allude) - it is closer to “the law of the land”, and the law of the land in a democracy is entirely for the people to dictate.
That is, the laws of economics can be politically adjusted like any other law. Increased union powers, for example, can put workers in a better position to bargain for their wages, by withdrawing the supply of labour entirely (and therefore decreasing supply) until an acceptable wage is offered.
Tariffs, capital controls, and similar, can be deployed to prevent foreign countries undercutting domestic economic laws - that is why the EU, for example, is not willing to let the Tory government abolish workers’ paid holiday after Brexit in order to try and undercut other European workers (who would then lose their paid holiday in turn, if they are forced to “compete” with British workers to the bottom).
Other political actions can also reduce the demand (and wages) at the top end, for CEOs for example, by encouraging industrial consolidation (which both reduces the overall number of CEOs required in the economy, and reduces the number of separate organisations bidding up wages to compete for their supposedly rare talents). If there is such a shortage of such talent, why doesn’t the government abolish competition, in order to attenuate demand and therefore undermine the wages of the highest paid?
The only difference between the 1960s and today is that the “laws of economics” back then included high tax rates, stiff regulation, strong trade union powers, and so on. And bosses weren’t allowed to play around with complex corporate structures and offshore tax havens as easy as shuffling a pack of cards.
The “free market” is never a truly free market in which the bosses face the same personal consequences as workers for refusing to participate in the economy. The worker faces almost immediate hunger, whereas the boss could live out his life on what he already has stored for himself - and for that reason, the boss never has to let up on eating caviar before the workers are starved back to work. The free market is an ideal of capitalist economic theory, a fantasy of right-wing intellectuals, which never really exists in practice.
What does exist in practice is a market that is rigged to a greater or lesser degree in favour of the bosses. Bosses have large personal wealth as their form of social security. Bosses have private property rights over the workplaces and machinery that workers build and operate, and it is these rights that allow them to quickly cut workers off from food and shelter, without workers having a corresponding right to quickly cut bosses off from food and shelter. So whenever workers and bosses can’t agree on wages, the bosses just sit back and let starvation set in until workers accept less.
It fails me why workers have come to see this arrangement as some sort of natural law, rather than a man-made law, and their own exploitation in these rigged and unequal circumstances as simply the operation of a “supply and demand” mechanism.
It’s only when workers threaten to expropriate workplaces, to expropriate property and other capital, that the two classes really meet on equal terms in the marketplace - and when they meet on equal terms, and when the mechanism of supply and demand then operates, the bosses end up with no more wealth and reward than the average worker, because their wealth and reward was never based on working a billion times harder or smarter than a worker or contributing a billion times more of anything, it was based on their privilege within an exploitative arrangement of economic laws, and the workers’ disadvantage within the same arrangement.
End of sermon. 