this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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Correct. Also most jobs are only worth something as part of a unit. A janitor alone is useless, but a janitor part of an office environment is extremely valuable to allow everyone else to work.
An hour of labor is an hour of labor. Productivity can increase or decrease, but the labor will still be an hour. A chair that is able to be built in half the time it once was due to new tools and methods has less Value than it once had.
Read Wage Labor and Capital and follow it with Value, Price and Profit if you want to really understand what Marxists believe. They go in-depth on what constitutes Value by Labor.
If 5 people including a janitor produce 1mil in profit. And having 4 people, no janitor makes 600k in profit due to having to work in filth and taking breaks to clean up then the janitor is worth 400k. It's not really that complicated. Capitalists like to pretend these things are complicated when they're not. Companies have a damn good idea of what their janitors are worth because it's constantly compared with what they cost to see if they can do without them or outsource them to a contractor.
When it comes time to PAY them they don't care what they're worth anymore, just how little they can pay someone to do the job.