Are service sector employees exploited?

[chimx]

We were having a conversation on livechat and this topic came up:

[00:14] <chimx> so, [workers in the service industry] who sell their labor power do not have surplus value extracted from the sale of their labor to the employer?
[00:14] <TragicClown> no they sell their time without selling productive labour

However, it is my understanding that Marx would argue otherwise.

Marx acknowledged that commodity production in this manner necessitates a division of labor. In this sense, those that sell the commodity are as instrumental to the creation of surplus value as those who physically create the commodity. In Volume II of Das Kapital Marx writes:


To the capitalist who has others working for him, buying and selling becomes a primary function. Since he appropriates the product of many on a large social scale, he must sell it on the same scale and then reconvert it from money into elements of production. Now as before neither the time of purchase nor of sale creates any value. The function of merchant’s capital give rise to an illusion. But without going into this at length here this much is plain from the start: If by a division of labour a function, unproductive in itself although a necessary element of reproduction, is transformed from an incidental occupation many into an exclusive occupation of a few, into their special business, the nature of this function itself is not changed. One merchant (here considered a mere agent attending to the change of form of commodities, a mere buyer and seller) may by his operations shorten the time of purchase and sale for many producers. In such case he should be regarded as a machine which reduces useless expenditure of energy or helps to set production time free.

What are other people's opinions of the service sector. Are these workers exploited, or do you agree with SovietPants and TragicClown who argue that service sector workers are not exploited?

[bezdomni]

It is important to recognize what Marx is saying there, and especially to note that he is not arguing that those employed in the service are exploited at all.

What this question really asks is this: What is the nature of capitalist exploitation?

To the Marxist, there is a fundamental difference between the worker in a production line somewhere in South America or South Asia doing the same menial task in subhuman conditions at all hours of the day and the union worker in the US who is guaranteed some degree of safety in the workplace, an 8 hour work day and a subsistence wage. Obviously, there are people in the US who are either both not promised nor provided these things, or who are promised but not provided these things. They seem to be more the exception than the rule...the caveat here being the black nation in the United States and migrant farm workers in the United States. White people in the U.S. are generally not exploited in the scientific Marxist sense of the word.

As TC and I said in livechat though, there is a difference between being oppressed and exploited. Service sector workers can be and are oppressed by the social conditions that correspond to capitalism, but by the nature of their labor, they are not exploited because they are non-productive.

In a similar way, there are even some productive laborers who are not exploited. People who build airplanes for Boeing and make hundreds of thousands of dollars, for example, are doing productive labor but are obviously more than compensated for it.

Imperialism does some weird things that we gotta understand. Uneven development is really critical to understanding the workings of capitalism and how to organize for revolution.

[AGITprop]

We were having a conversation on livechat and this topic came up:

[00:14] <chimx> so, [workers in the service industry] who sell their labor power do not have surplus value extracted from the sale of their labor to the employer?
[00:14] <TragicClown> no they sell their time without selling productive labour

However, it is my understanding that Marx would argue otherwise.

Marx acknowledged that commodity production in this manner necessitates a division of labor. In this sense, those that sell the commodity are as instrumental to the creation of surplus value as those who physically create the commodity. In Volume II of Das Kapital Marx writes:



What are other people's opinions of the service sector. Are these workers exploited, or do you agree with SovietPants and TragicClown who argue that service sector workers are not exploited?

Thats an excellent quote. I agree that public sector workers are proletariat. This includes; teachers,salespeople,waiters, police officers (not that I support the armed wing of the ruling class) etc etc.

[chimx]

Service sector workers can be and are oppressed by the social conditions that correspond to capitalism, but by the nature of their labor, they are not exploited because they are non-productive.

The sale of the commodity is generally a necessity for capital reproduction. Marx is saying that the division of labor creates service sector employees to facilitate this process. Thus their labor is a productive force in that it creates further surplus value for the employer.

Your problem comes from ignoring the existence of labor division and focusing on single functions within the process of commodity production.


White people in the U.S. are generally not exploited in the scientific Marxist sense of the word.

This is both a ridiculous claim and a topic deserving of its own thread.

[chimx]

police officers

While police officers may offer a useful and/or necessary service to society, it's a service that comes at the expense of surplus value, and does not directly add to it. I believe most Marxists would not classify the job as productive labor, despite it's usefulness.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The sale of the commodity is generally a necessity for capital reproduction. Marx is saying that the division of labor creates service sector employees to facilitate this process. Thus their labor is a productive force in that it creates further surplus value for the employer.

Your problem comes from ignoring the existence of labor division and focusing on single functions within the process of commodity production.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/article-submissions-f30/index.html

One more thing to note is that there are still some Marxists who equate the word “proletarian” with those who work strictly to produce commodities, separating them from the rest of the working class. There are distinctions within the working class, and they are sectoral, but historically the classical Marxists used the two words interchangeably. The sectoral distinctions have arisen as a result of the development of capitalism as a whole. First came the manual workers – forestry and mining workers, factory workers, and proper farm workers (as opposed to peasants), among others – most of whom are indeed involved in the production of commodities. Then came the clerical workers – office workers, typical retail workers (except those doing heavy-lifting in the warehouses), bank tellers, bartenders, and others – who are involved in the provision of services.

A trend in the development of the capitalism has been professionalization, even that of intellectual work, as noted by Frank Furedi in his work Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting Twenty-First Century Philistinism. With this trend comes professional workers, including teachers, professors, engineers, nurses, and most accountants (who neither have ownership stakes in accounting firms nor exercise “factual control” through management).


While police officers may offer a useful and/or necessary service to society, it's a service that comes at the expense of surplus value, and does not directly add to it. I believe most Marxists would not classify the job as productive labor, despite it's usefulness.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/article-submissions-f30/index.html

In Chapter 16 of Volume I of Das Kapital, Marx talks about a concept called “productive labour”:

On the other hand, however, our notion of productive labour becomes narrowed. Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus value. The labourer produces, not for themselves, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that they should simply produce. They must produce surplus-value.

Related to this concept is the broader development of society’s labour power and its capabilities, the second factor that should be considered in class analysis. Both capital and productive labour enable this development. However, there is a class within the wage-labour system that does not enable this development, and this class is composed entirely of elements that are part of the 19th-century definition of “petit-bourgeoisie.”

One major group in this class is “descended” from the old bailiffs (or sheriffs), whom Frederick Engels commented on in The Peasant War in Germany:

On the contrary, the city magistrates and bailiffs, mostly patricians, brought into the villages, together with aristocratic rigidity and avarice, a certain bureaucratic punctuality in collecting duties.

This group happens to be that of modern police officers, who merely contribute to the protection of the capitalist state machinery. Also involved in the protection of the capitalist state machinery are lawyers and judges. Performing similar functions for the “epoch of the bourgeoisie” as a whole are security guards and strikebreakers.

[chimx]

It is a much more difficult argument to make however since unlike the service sector, police officers, lawyers, firefighters, etc. do not contribute to the production of surplus value in as a direct a manner.

Regardless, that's another good quotation by Marx that clearly illustrates my point.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ If you read my article (and the text above is a portion of that article), I said there that cops belong to a different class altogether. My "six classes" analysis has been further expanded there.

Firefighters, IMO, are workers, because they do help the advancement of the productive forces (saving commercial buildings, for example). They don't merely protect the capitalist state machinery, unlike cops, lawyers, and judges.

[BIG BROTHER]

I ocacionally work in the service sector of house cleaning, and I'll be dammed if they tell me that we're not exploited. Of course we have it better than a lot of people but we're still exploited.

[chimx]

Firefighters, IMO, are workers, because they do help the advancement of the productive forces (saving commercial buildings, for example). They don't merely protect the capitalist state machinery, unlike cops, lawyers, and judges.

I'm not sure if saving commerical buildings from potential fires constitutes a function within the production of surplus value. I'm not disagreeing that it isn't useful labor, and that those who work the job don't have it rough, but whether it is productive labor I think is debatable.


I ocacionally work in the service sector of house cleaning, and I'll be dammed if they tell me that we're not exploited. Of course we have it better than a lot of people but we're still exploited.

I agree, it strikes me as asinine too.

Let me try to offer up an example. I'm a capitalist at chimx's boot builders Inc ($100 a pair). I hire one person to make the boots, and one person to make the boot lases. I pay them each $10/hr ($20/hr). By themselves they can make 1 pair of boots every hour.

I also hire a worker to simply transport the shoe lases from the the boot lase worker to the boot maker. I pay him $5/hr and because of his work it saves the boot lase worker and boot maker time. They are able to produce twice as many finished boots a day because of the time saved. The transporter may not actual take part in the physical act of reproducing the boot, but by dividing the labor I am able to extract a greater surplus value from my workers due to his work.

Equally so, the service worker may not have the physical function of producing the boot, but by saving the actual producers time in the sale of the boots, he is adding to the surplus value I am able to collect.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ FYI, in my class analysis chapter, most service-sector employees are what I call "clerical workers" (even bartenders). That's because the folks in the warehouses out in the back perform manual work as "manual workers" (like factory workers and rural farm workers).

[YSR]

I think there's also something important to be said about the role of the service industry as being part of the reproduction of labor.

My intimate knowledge of Marxism is limited, so I'll refrain from saying "Marx says this or that." But I do think that the service industry creates value and that workers there are exploited. The service industry, while obviously a capitalist sector, operates in similar ways to the home. Homemakers are workers that allow labor to be reproduced outside of the workplace. Likewise, the work of the service industry allows workers in productive labor to do their work. For example: as food technology have increased, the conditions for restaurants have developed in the developed world. Workers use these restaurants to reduce the amount of time they need to be in the home, thus allowing more time to be spent at work or recovering from work.

Just because we don't see service industry workers are necessarily that useful for post-capitalist economies doesn't mean that their role doesn't produce value for capital.

[Niccolò Rossi]

chimx, I would completely agree with you. The division of labour necessitates service sector workers. Whilst they may not themselves produce surplus value, they facilitate the exchange of commodities and are thus and essential element in the production of surplus value, whether they themselves produce any or not.

But really, what ever you want to call the service sector worker, it is essential to acknowledge they are oppressed. They, like every other worker, are the slaves of capital, and whether their chains be plated in gold or caste of lead (as SovietPants was insisting as the difference between first and third world workers), are an essential element in the socialist revolution for they (even if they don't realise it), have a vested interest in the destruction of capital.

[Sendo]

it depends on the service. Cashiering provides no production at all, nor does waiting on tables, yet the people need jobs as a means to buy food, and they deserve living wages as much as anyone else. The problem is that we have a society that requires Cashiers and will not employ them in bridge-building.

Like josefrancisco said, house cleaning is useful labor. Labor does NOT have to physically manufacture consumer goods to be exploitable. Janitors are needed to keep hallways clear, just as groundkeepers are needed to keep lawns growing. both are way underpaid. That's why market socialism would never be enough. You cannot have every business be splitting profits among workers based on contribution to the selling value--you can't say that janitors directly made the $5 leather and $6 laces into a $20 shoe.

Service workers are not directly cheated out of their creation of labor-value the way a shoecrafter is, but they are necessary for the system to work, and there is no universally accepted way to say what percent of the $9 they contributed.

I'd like to hear TragicClown's responses to this thread, too. I don't know what exactly he is arguing, the excerpt (or entire conversation) leaves too much to be assumed as to what he meant. Service sector can mean different things depending on whom you ask.

[chimx]

You cannot have every business be splitting profits among workers based on contribution to the selling value--you can't say that janitors directly made the $5 leather and $6 laces into a $20 shoe.

But if the workers who made the leather and the laces had to dedicate a part of their day to make sure the factory stayed clean and organized, they wouldn't be able to produce as much. having an individual janitor perform these tasks divides the labor more efficiently so that a business owner can collect a larger surplus value.

The same can be said of waiters if cooks who prepared the food were also required to give it out to those who ordered it. Same with cashiers who save producers from having to sell the commodity.


I'd like to hear TragicClown's responses to this thread, too. I don't know what exactly he is arguing, the excerpt (or entire conversation) leaves too much to be assumed as to what he meant. Service sector can mean different things depending on whom you ask.

She had taken the same position as Mr. Sovietpants. I don't think I am doing her an injustice by quoting her out of context, but yes, I would appreciate a reply from her in this thread -- though she is a busy lady these days from what I understand.

[Qwerty Dvorak]

I think that, while service labour does not create any tangible goods, it certainly produces value by virtue of the fact that a pair of boots (in keeping with chimx's example) on display in the shop down the road is more valuable to both the consumer and the capitalist than a pair of boots in a factory somewhere.



As TC and I said in livechat though, there is a difference between being oppressed and exploited. Service sector workers can be and are oppressed by the social conditions that correspond to capitalism, but by the nature of their labor, they are not exploited because they are non-productive.
I don't know if you are using some particular Marxist definition of the word "exploited" but going by the normal definition of the word there is no reason that service workers cannot be exploited just because they do not produce value in the form of tangible goods. Their labour is bought by the capitalist at a rate which is very unfavourable to them and favourable to the capitalist, they are then oppressed as you claim and the capitalist profits. That is exploitation.

[which doctor]

it depends on the service. Cashiering provides no production at all, nor does waiting on tables, yet the people need jobs as a means to buy food, and they deserve living wages as much as anyone else. The problem is that we have a society that requires Cashiers and will not employ them in bridge-building.

In nearly all cases, service workers do add value to their products, they wouldn't be employed if they didn't. Service employees perform value-adding functions such as logistics, facilitation of purchases, hospitality, assembling, etc., though not exactly in the same way manual workers do. Their value-added isn't necessarily tangible, but it is something that customers and paying for. To not call service workers proletarian is ludicrous.

[Luís Henrique]

The transporter may not actual take part in the physical act of reproducing the boot, but by dividing the labor I am able to extract a greater surplus value from my workers due to his work.

Careful there, the divisionists may take this as an admission that the poor transporter is in fact an exploiter, or an accomplicit in exploitation...

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

In nearly all cases, service workers do add value to their products, they wouldn't be employed if they didn't. Service employees perform value-adding functions such as logistics, facilitation of purchases, hospitality, assembling, etc., though not exactly in the same way manual workers do. Their value-added isn't necessarily tangible, but it is something that customers and paying for. To not call service workers proletarian is ludicrous.

Any worker producing a commodity is producing surplus value, even if such commodity is a service. The commodity is sold by the value of the work it takes to produce it, while the worker is paid by the value of the work it takes to reproduce his labour force.

There are only two important groups of workers who do not produce surplus value at all. First, those whose services are not sold as commodities, but distributed by the State (teachers, firefighters, bureaucrats, policemen and other law enforcers, diplomats, soldiers, tax levelers, etc). Second, commerce workers, who perform sales - the performing of sales, of course, not being a commodity in itself.

Both groups can be dealt with by a generalisation of Marx's argument quoted by chimx, from the indivicual company level to the social level. They do not produce surplus value themselves, but their work increases - or perhaps makes even possible - the production of surplus value.

Lu&#237;s Henrique

[black magick hustla]

Again, if the third worldist maoists were correct, the mayority of workers in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico would be parasital, and therefore those countries imperialist. :rolleyes:

Its nothing but marxism upside down.

[Luís Henrique]

Again, if the third worldist maoists were correct, the mayority of workers in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico would be parasital, and therefore those countries imperialist. :rolleyes:

And South Africa. And Iran. And Russia. And...

With China and India quickly regaining their lost prominence, we will end with a world with no proletarians.


Its nothing but marxism upside down.

Not so.

There is a story by Jorge Luís Borges (El Informe de Brodie) about a people called Yahoos. They choose their kings more or less the way the Tibetans used to choose the Dalai Lama. But the important thing: they amputated the king's arms and legs, blinded him, deafened him, cut his tongue out, and castrated him. And that is what such "marxists" do to Marxism.

Luís Henrique

[black magick hustla]

With China and India quickly regaining their lost prominence, we will end with a world with no proletarians.

The funny thing is that Tragic Clown comes from a tradition of "militant defense" of "socialist states", including China (yeah, China is a legitimate "workers' state" than needs to be defended :lol:). Its going to be a pretty funny contradiction.






There is a story by Jorge Luís Borges (El Informe de Brodie) about a people called Yahoos. They choose their kings more or less the way the Tibetans used to choose the Dalai Lama. But the important thing: they amputated the king's arms and legs, blinded him, deafened him, cut his tongue out, and castrated him. And that is what such "marxists" do to Marxism.

Luís Henrique

I love Borges, I have to read that.