Pay
At What Rate? Who decides?
In a capitalist economy all transactions have a buyer and a seller. These compete. The buyer wants the lowest price and the seller wants the highest price.
Workers get paid for their labour. They want to be paid enough to be able to live a good life. But how is a good life defined. Its a pretty open ended question.
Employers want to pay as little as they can. And are generally in a stronger bargaining position.
For most of my working life I was happy to have a stable job which left me in a very weak position when trying to get a raise.
Unions emerged as a way of strengthening the worker's position. JK Galbraith noticed that big corporations tended to like unions. When you are building a billion dollar project it's important to have a docile and predictable workforce. Besides negotiating on behalf of workers unions also accepted a set of rules about how the workplace was run.
What could possibly go wrong? Who knew that unions would become a sort of labour aristocracy - life was good for union members. But it was also very hard to get into a union.
In my case I couldn't.
Right now most of Canada's ports are shut down on both coasts in separate disputes. The post office is closed too. Nobody is pleased. But the strikes just have to play out.
Years ago Canada tried wage and price controls to control run away inflation. Neither could be changed without approval of some agency. It caused a ruckus and only had a minor influence on inflation.
The media has been talking a lot about inflation and its effect on families. Parents are reported to be foregoing their own supper so they could pay for medicine for a sick child. Somehow the government should wave a wand and make the problem go away.
One solution would be a guaranteed annual income that would top up low paying jobs to some sort of national standard of income. I think that this is possible but would require establishing that standard. I think the Capabilities Approach from Nussbaum/Sen would be fruitful for establishing a standard.
Another approach might be to just give all citizens a bottomless bank account. That might lead to a situation where nobody got paid to go to work. There would have to be other incentives. Lots of work is very interesting and satisfying to do. People who didn't need pay would still compete to fill those positions.
I know of a young woman who recently was hired as a pilot flying big jets for airlines. Her training was long and intense. She (with help of family) paid that herself. And I don't think she did it because she was expecting to get rich from her salary.
Her Mom could see the landing approach at the airport that was her home base. As she landed daughter blinked the landing lights on the plane as a wave to Mom and Dad.
That wasn't a spontaneous act at all. You don't act spontaneously when you are the pilot of a jet unless you are dealing with very unusual circumstances.
Amateur theatre and sports are other examples of things that people devote hours to training and then compete for a position with no pay.
And pay isn't the only or even main issue in the recent labour disputes. People are being overworked because the employer is understaffed. OK- That's basically a pay issue,
But I see out my window a bunch of the giant cranes that load and unload containers from big ships. I imagine that operating those things is a satisfying thing to do.
Obviously a team sport. I worked with a crane once. It could lift 110 tons. It was delivering concrete to a form and I was giving hand signals to direct placement. The guy running the crane had a sidekick up there where the motor was who was called the greaser.
What if teams that ran cranes could compete in some kind of thing like the Olympics with mass media attention. In the context that nobody needed to be paid to do it?
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.