How does surplus value apply to public-sector government or nonprofit jobs?

[heiss93]

How does surplus value apply to public-sector government or nonprofit jobs? For example teachers, firefighters, police, army, museums, nonprofit staff etc. Since they do not derive a profit how do they extract a surplus value? some government agencies, actually many, operate at a loss. Does surplus value apply?

[gilhyle]

Surplus value is created in production and distributed through the realisation of profit in commerce. Thus some surplus value is realised as profit for the producing capitalist and some for financiers, merchants, rentiers etc. That is then surrendered as taxes and redistributed finance those to whom you refer. Is there a problem with that ?

[heiss93]

According to that analysis wouldn't that mean that public-sector workers are paid their full value and thus not exploited?

My question was how are government workers exploited if profits are not involved?

I belive Marx wrote almost entirely about private corporations. During Marx's time the only public-service workers were the military and civil service. I belive Marx considered civil servants to be petty-bourgeoisie.

However under modern state-monopoly capitalism, the numbers of state employees has risen drastically, and they are more clearly working class and not petty-bourgeois. In the 20th century the teachers, police and transit union all launched important strikes. This is even more relevant in Western Europe and Scandinavia where an even greater portion of the population is employed directly by the government.

However I still don't understand how the Law of Surplus Value and Exploitation apply.