Recently, a meme from one of Twitter’s many socialist residents has gotten a lot of attention. The message he seems to be presenting is that workers are undervalued, because they are paid much less than what they produce:
The implication is clear, and it represents a popular talking point in social circles. The worker in this meme produces 3,000 of those plastic bags per hour of work but is only paid enough per hour to buy 3 of them. That would mean you get paid a thousandth of the value of what you produce! This is definitely exploitation, isn’t it?
Well then. There are two major points that this meme misses that change the picture a bit. The first is that the worker here cannot produce 3,000 of those plastic rings per hour. If he could do that, he would just go buy it from his garage and make it himself, sell it directly and improve his income a lot. He can only make 3,000 an hour because he is working on machines made by others and paid for by others. His work, by itself, is not enough to generate 3,000 per hour. It needs to combine his work with the company’s large investment to make his work more productive, which happens in the context of a business that provides him with a place to work, raw materials, and tools, that manages orders and sales. , and countless other factors necessary for him to be able to do what he does. In order for that worker to say he is producing 3,000 an hour for his work, he has to significantly reduce and waste the work and investment made by many other people. His work is important, sure, but it’s one small step in an inexplicably complex process that involves the cooperation of countless workers who reproduce those plastic bracelets.
As is often the case, the flaw in this type of thinking was pointed out by Adam Smith, in his well-known (but apparently not well-known enough) description of what ultimately goes into producing a simple woolen coat:
The woolen coat, for example, which covers the day laborer, as coarse and tough as it may seem, is the product of the combined labor of a large crowd of workers. The shepherd, and the wool-winner, and the wool-maker or blacksmith, and the changer, and the weaver, and the weaver, and the weaver, and the weaver, and the tailor, and the dresser, and many others, let them all combine their various duties, in order to accomplish this. domestic production. How many merchants and porters, besides, must have been employed in transporting goods from some of those laborers to others who often lived in the most distant parts of the country! How much trade and navigation in particular, how many shipbuilders, sailors, sail makers, rope makers, must have been employed to combine the different dyes used, often from very distant places. of the world! What a variety of labors are required to produce the tools of the poorest of those workers! To say nothing of such complex machinery as a sailor’s ship, a fulling machine’s mill, or even a weaver’s loom, let us consider only what is required for the various operations to build that simple machine, the shears. the shepherd shears the wool with it. the miner, the furnace builder, the woodcutter, the coal burner, and the brickmaker, and the brickmaker, and the furnace workers, the miller, the blacksmith, and the blacksmith, let them all engage in their different crafts to make them… we will be sensible that without help and cooperation of many thousands, the most corrupt man in a civilized world would not be provided for.
In today’s world, the web of jobs and operations that lead to the production of those plastic rings, if anything, is inexplicably greater than what Adam Smith describes in the production of a woolen coat in the eighteenth century. All that work, effort, investment, and cooperation is erased from existence by the kind of “thinking” used in this meme. Although socialists may claim to be the allies of labor, when they make claims of this kind, they are wildly belittling and dismissing the importance of the cooperative efforts of large numbers of workers.
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