The theory of "compensating wage differentials" of labor economics says that more dangerous or insecure jobs (etc.) will pay higher wages than safer jobs or those with job security. This theory is supposed to work because workers shun dangerous or insecure jobs and thus need to be paid more to take them. But the last time I did a literature survey of this issue (a long time ago), it indicated that the empirical evidence for this theory was very bad -- except when labor unions were able to push for wage premia to compensate for job danger, insecurity, etc. This empirical weakness has hardly ever been mentioned in textbooks as far as I can tell.
The irony is that one of the cases that many old textbooks used was the need to pay Soviet workers more to get them to work in Siberia. But this doesn't justify the theory under capitalism, since the old USSR had full employment and, in many sectors, excess demand for labor-power. So the "cost of job loss" that undermines the theory's workings didn't exist to the same extent that it exists under capitalism in normal times. Is anyone more up-to-date on this issue than I am? Is my perception correct? Jim Devine, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web: http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/
