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["Shea Tisdale" <shea AT sheatisdale.com>]

Thomas wrote:
> Tony Spencer wrote:
> > I'm hiring my first employees for my fledgling company as we speak.
> 
> Congratulations, Tony!  That is a huge step.
> 
> > Its
> > exciting for me to contribute to someone's salary and are my employees
> are
> > being screwed?  Absolutely not.
> 
> This is the interesting thing about Capitalism.  Marx is correct here,
> Tony is hiring someone because he can make more money from their labor
> than he is paying them.  Extracting value.  But he is paying a fair
> wage?  Ostensibly yes, according to the market.  Question is, is the
> market wage distorted by a) oversupply of labor ("jobless recovery") or
> b) Tony's unfair bargaining power?  I can't answer the first, I think
> the answer to the second is negative.  This is why small business is the
> foundation of our economy.

Or you could look at the myriad of other factors involved... Perhaps Tony is
paying his employee a "Fair wage" or even better than fair.  But maybe Tony
adds value to the labor of the person he is hiring by selling, by managing
their projects, communicating with clients and by performing tasks such as
payroll, billing, etc.  And is the combination of those efforts worth more
than the sum of the individual labor components to his customers?  

> 
> OTOH, does Wal-mart pay its "associates" a fair wage?  Let's see,
> Wal-Mart employs more people than the population of some sovereign
> nations or U.S. states.  But only one Wal-mart store has a collective
> bargaining agreement.