Thomas Lunde:
>In summing up this lengthy rebuttal, I have had to do some soul searching
>about my concepts. Basically, I believe people come before profit and that
>people are more important than profit.
If by this you mean that people should not be economically exploited, and
that they should be paid the full measure of their worth in productive
processes, I would fully agree. However, there remains the problem of
determining what their full worth is. In Economics 101, under "perfectly
competitive equilibrium", everybody is paid their full worth, and there is
no possibility of monopoly profit, since monopoly does not exist. However,
like the much maligned economist's assumption of "rationality", perfectly
competitive equilibrium is an abstraction. Economists know that it does not
exist, but that it is nonetheless useful in furthering economic analysis.
In the real world, there are all kinds of market distortions and
monopolistic elements which make a logically valid pegging of "full worth"
pretty nigh impossible.
So other means must be found to avoid the economic exploitation of labour.
One is collective bargaining - power against power. Another is
arbitration - let a higher authority decide. The latter was recently used
to determine whether women were being paid fairly in the Canadian public
service. The matter went before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which
ruled that women were not being paid fairly in comparison with men doing
equivalent work. The result: the Government of Canada is faced with
billions of dollars in back pay and higher wage levels from women from here
on.
Ed Weick
