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NEWS & LETTERS, March-April 2005Day laborers pay to 'deliver' themselves
Chicago--Day labor organizers in Chicago rewrote the
Illinois Day Labor Services Act which was already the strongest state law
protecting day laborers in the nation. But it needed to be made stronger. The
revised act allows day labor agencies to continue to deduct fees for
transportation from day laborers' paychecks. I tried to convince the organizers that the so-called
"transportation" section was weak because it contained a misconception
of labor within the capitalist mode of production. The day labor agencies
continue to take the "delivery charges" for their "labor
power" from the workers' paychecks rather than forcing normal delivery
arrangements to be made as for other commodities. The word
"transportation" is never used in association with the delivery of
commodities except as an industrial category. The question in this case is: "What is being
transported?" The superficial answer seems to be "persons" or
"workers." Karl Marx points out that "labor" has a dual
character. Labor might be viewed as a subjective activity done by the individual
for whatever purpose. But under capitalism, because the few own the means of
production, most people sell their ability to work at a certain technological
level to the capitalist at the market price. The capitalist must make the laborer perform her duties
at a level appropriate for the technological level that a particular product can
be generally made at. Thus the laborer is not selling his or her labor to the
capitalist like a personal piece of work, but is actually selling the potential
to produce wealth for the capitalist enterprise (labor power) at a price the
capitalist will agree to (the market price). In the case of a day labor agency, the worker is selling
labor power to the agency, which then sells that labor power to produce the
goods and services that the client demands. Under normal circumstances, the
possessor of a commodity delivers it to the buyer, usually at the expense of the
buyer. No commodity other than LABOR POWER even has the capacity to pay for its
own delivery--and, of course, nobody in his right mind would expect it to. --Dennis Dixon |
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