Like I said, for one, you’re employing him for his literal labour. His time. If he does the work in half the time, you’d pay him half as much. Sure, there’s a minimum there, but for longer jobs, or, say, construction work, he’s paid for the time spent.
The other, just the outputs. If he can produce pies in half the time, he can take that labour saving and sell twice as many pies. Or sell his pies at a more attractive half-price. Or spend the time gained in learning how to make croissants. Etc.
That’s one functional difference - the wage earner’s time is more directly tied to earnings. The self-employed, a bit less so. That can be significant - which is more likely to be an incipient capitalist, the wage earner or the self-empoyed?
Huh. While that’s maybe technically true (as in, on the invoice the plumber will list hours worked), in practical terms it’s not true. I get an estimate for, and pay for, a service provided, just as with a baker I get an estimate for, and pay for, a good provided.
From the purchaser’s point of view, I’m not buying 2 hours of plumber labor; I’m buying a fixed drainpipe.
I don’t know if plumbers et al feel like they’re selling hours of labor.
I disagree. The plumber doesn’t charge a fixed price, and if things go wrong and he needs to spend 6 hours not 2, you’re not going to get off with the two-hour price.
When that happens, though, it turns out that I’m paying him for a different service than I’d anticipated: instead of a fixed drainpipe, I’m paying for replacing all the pipes in the bathroom. He explains the more complicated service that I need, and I pretend to consider whether or not to pay for it, really just dying a little inside as I worry about the money.
This may just be a semantic argument, but every time I’ve contracted with someone to complete a job, I’m looking to have a service completed, not to employ them for a set length of time. It feels much closer to buying a discrete good than it does to gaining an employee.
No, I’m talking about when he fixes the one pipe, but it turns out he needs to chisel away some concrete to get at the junction. And then it turns out that one pipe has roots growing into it. And then he has to go via the neighbour’s garden to get at the roots.
Still the same outcome (fix my one pipe) but way more labour than originally estimated.
Sure, but that’s still why “fix my pipe” is an estimate, and actual hours can differ.
When I have the plumbers and electricians in for a remodel, it very much feels like they are employees not vendors. So I think this is just a perception difference.
But that’s not necessarily how it always works, or how it has to work. Someone might hire a plumber to fix a broken toilet. The plumber (hypothetically) says “that will be $300”, regardless of the time he spends. He charges by the job, not by the time.
Still wage labour. You’re not paying for a new toilet, you’re still paying for the plumber’s time to do a thing.
Look, I can keep this part of the discussion up all day, but the precise details of exactly what occupation does or doesn’t constitute wage labour aren’t really the point.
The point is that wage labour is fundamentally part of capitalism. That’s all. Plumbers vs bakers aren’t really the issue - neither of those is mass employment. It’s peasants vs factory workers vs call centre workers that’s the issue.
So I went over the last 40 or so posts looking to “see above,” and hit this:
Maybe this is why I’m hung up on the plumber example. In a post-capitalist system that still uses currency and still has bakers who sell muffins, but in which people are not wage laborers, how would plumbers work that’d be clearly different from how they work now?
I’m just not seeing a distinction between the plumber and the baker that’s both well-defined and crucial to understanding how post-capitalism would operate.
I meant literally the previous post I made to iiandyiiii
I see the problem, I think.
For “people” read “most people”. Some people still being wage labourers doesn’t preclude a system being post-capitalist.
Especially if most of those wage labourers are of the plumber type (so, not long-term contract, choice in each work task, sets own hours etc.), as opposed to the factory worker or bank clerk type.
I think so. My classification is different from yours (I see the baker/plumber distinction between goods providers and service providers not as between non-wage workers and wage workers), but agree that the factory-workers and bank-clerk workers (and nurses for for-profit hospitals, and custodians for franchise restaurants, and all the myriad other people who punch a clock or receive a salary from for-profit institutions) are the ones who’d see the biggest changes if we move away from wages paid by capitalists in exchange for our labor.
If you get your pies from whatever the US equivalent of Greggs is, you’re going to be getting it from a wage labourer (I mean the person who baked it). So the goods/service distinction isn’t that meaningful for a discussion like this.
The worker’s relationship to their employer, if any, and to the profits of their labour, are what counts.
I buy my pies from Walmart. The baker provides goods as a wage worker.
I buy my pies from my co-worker who bakes as a side gig. The baker provides goods without being a wage worker.
I get my pipes fixed by Roto-rooter. The plumber provides services as a wage worker.
I get my pipes fixed by Jason Smith, owner and sole plumber of Jason Smith Plumbing. The plumber provides services without being a wage worker.
What I’m saying is that I think you’re drawing a distinction between plumbers and bakers based on whether they’re wage workers, but that’s not a distinction I draw. Both can be wage-workers or non-wage-workers.
I was not drawing a distinction between all plumbers, and all bakers. Plumbers could be waged or not, and bakers could be waged, or not. The specific plumber and baker examples given were waged and self-employed, respectively, but plumbers or bakers, as a class, aren’t confined to either class.
In fact, given the ubiquity of Greggs, King Pie and other chain bakeries, as well as chain bread and cake stores, I’m sure more bakers are wage labourers than not - in the UK, in South Africa, and in the USA.
Or the plumber, if they own the plumbing company and snake the drains. Some of them do.
Including, I expect, whether he takes that particular job at all.
OK, I think I see the distinction you’re making.
It just doesn’t seem a relevant distinction to me. The plumber’s being paid for the fixed sink. The baker’s being paid for the baked pie. The plumber will charge more for a plumbing job that takes longer to do, and/or that requires more or more expensive parts. The baker will charge more for the pie that takes longer to bake, or that requires more or more expensive ingredients. Both of them are working for themselves (presuming of course that they do; other bakers and other plumbers sometimes certainly work for wages.) Both of them set their prices; both of them set their terms of how and when they’ll do the job, what jobs they will and won’t do, and what they won’t put up with from customers. Both of them create specific value with their labor, and both of them charge for it, including in their pricing calculations their time and the needed supplies.
Where is the relevance of the difference that one of them is producing tangible physical goods and the other is producing the tangible function of repairing physical goods?
It doesn’t to me. I don’t get to tell them how to do the job, or what hours to work, or when to break for lunch, or indeed much of anything else other than ‘please don’t drive off with the white cat, he likes to get into vehicles’. It’s more the other way around: they tell me whether to crate the dog, or when they’re going to be working in the office so I won’t be able to use the desktop computer.
OK. There I see a clear distinction that’s relevant to the debate.
But it’s between two drastically different types of work both of which you’re calling by the same term; while you’re refusing to call by the same term two very similar types of self-employment. Is there some term you are willing to use to make the distinction that actually matters?
I don’t think “mass employment” works. It works for the call center; it doesn’t work for the one or several employees each of a host of small businesses. Whether each of those employees has a reasonable hope of eventually being the boss or a partner can make a lot of difference to their lives; but in the meantime they’re still wage laborers.
Or are you trying to say that the difference is what percentage of the population is so employed, so that if there are very many small businesses run by one to three partners, and many of them also hire one to a dozen people, that all adds up to “mass employment”?
And for the plumber and the baker who own their own businesses and also do the plumbing and the baking: that’s the same relationship.
Sure, but they’re not paying themselves an hourly rate, they’re taking everything left after the wage guys are paid.
One scales better for capitalization, in general. At least at that level, there’s a reason early capitalists were ultimately goods producers - tenant farmers, factory owners, and things like plumbers or the like stayed owner-operated for much longer.
How to do the specifics of their job, no. What hours? Generally, yes, they need to work around my schedule. When to break? My boss doesn’t tell me that, either.
Our IT guys at work do the same, but they’re definitely still wage workers. I don’t think that’s a set of criteria you can draw meaningful distinctions on, which was my point there.
Those aren’t really relevant for a discussion about post-capitalism, I think. It is the “mass workers” that matter.
No, I don’t think you can lump all the small employers’ workers across the board like that, their relationship to their employers isn’t generally the same as the mass workers in factories and call centres.
I’m OK with saying “mass workers” to refer to the most relevant group. Or, I don’t know, I feel like there’s probably a Latin term, tip of my tongue…
The same as the guy who just gets paid and doesn’t get a slice of the profits, you mean? I don’t think so…
I think the argument of what constitutes a “wage laborer” distracts from the point. Whatever you do for a living, a person can only create so much value based on a finite number of hours they work in a given day. Whether you are a baker, plumber, lawyer, or civil engineer, your labor does not scale (even working for yourself as a “solopreneur”.
As I see it, historically the biggest benefit of capitalism is the ability to privately fund initiatives that create more value than the sum of the individual labor that goes into them. Transcontinental railroads and aircraft factories and whatnot. I don’t see that going away anytime soon.
And, of course, what they get is what’s left after the costs of running the business is paid; whether or not that includes wages.
I find that if I want the job to get done I need to work around their schedule. And many bosses do tell their workers when to break.
If the discussion includes possibilities of other ways to do things, how are such businesses not relevant? They’re one of the other ways to do things.
No. I definitely didn’t mean that. I meant, and said, specifically the ones who also do the plumbing and the baking – that the fact that one plumbs and the other bakes doesn’t put them in different categories.
There are some things worth doing that can’t in practice be done by solo workers or even small multi-person enterprises. There are other things that can, and that are often done better on that scale. I think the problem isn’t that some types of operations need to be larger than others – it’s that we’re trying to do nearly everything on the very large scale, whether or not it’s necessary or even helpful to do it that way.