Surplus value

[Ballyfornia]

How does does Surplus Value effect 1st world workers?
The explanation i have heard of surplus value, is the Money that is not given to the worker after a job is completed. So if a person works for a business and makes a coat and the business owner pays him 50$, but the coat is sold for 150$, That means the workers surplus value is 100$?

How does surplus value effect jobs like a cleaner and other similar jobs that do not necessarily produce anything?

[Tommy4ever]

Surplus value is the value that the worker adds to the product he is producing through his labour and goes directly to the capitalist (profit basically). So if the capitalist paid $50 for the raw materials (also assume other costs are included in this for simplicity's sake) and $50 for the labour and then sold the coat for $150 then the surplus value would be $50.

The worker has taken $50 worth of materials and added $100 worth to its value - yet he only gets $50 for doing so.

Only workers involved in production actually create surplus value. So cleaners don't.

[Rooster]

Don't cleaners maintain the surplus value embodied in the dead labour of buildings and stuff? They're still working for a wage for exchange of their labour power. Do people in distribution networks or people who do things like clean dishes in kitchens produce no surplus value?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

If you work at a dry cleaner you would still be creating a product, in this case a service.

"A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker, to the extent that she sells her song for money she is a wage-earner and a merchant. But this very singer becomes a productive worker, when she is engaged by a contractor to sing and make money, since she directly produces capital." - Karl Marx

So, let's break it down hypothetically:

- The owner charges $50 to clean a jacket. That's the service being sold.
- It costs $10 in cleaning chemicals and wear and tear on the machinery to clean the jacket.
- The worker is paid $10 for the one hour of work he has to do to clean the jacket.
- The owner is left with $30.

[Blake's Baby]

Yes. Cleaners and other ancilliary workers help the process of turning commodities into money. In a dirty smelly unsafe factory with improper maintainance and no canteen, ten workers take $500 dollars of raw materials, and turn them and their machines into a pile of ash after a spark created by a badly-maintained machine operated by a hungry, unhappy and distracted worker who doesn't notice gets into a pile of uncleared rubbish and burns them and the raw materials to death.

As a for instance.

So cleaners don't actually add to the production process itself, but they make it more likely that the capitalist will be able to turn the commodities the other workers are producing into cash. In general, happy workers are more productive than unhappy workers, and cluttered workspaces are more difficult in general to use than clean workspaces (and less likely to eg catch fire) so things like cleaning the office actually help capitalist efficiency.