Re: Measuring exploitation

[Bruce Cronin <b.cronin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doug Henwood wrote:

>The World Bank publishes a wages as percent of value added in >manufacturing 
>for lots of countries over 20-30 years in its annual World >Tables. They are 
>in a downtrend in most of the countries I've looked at, with >the prominent 
>exception of S Korea. Here are the numbers from World >Tables 1994:

Moseley, Shaik and Tonak etc. point out that wages as a share of value added 
understates the degree of exploitation, as 'wages' includes payments to 
unproductive workers such as supervisors and managers. 

The category remainder of 'value added' after the deduction of 'wages' also 
bears little relation to the concept of surplus value as it excludes flows of 
surplus value classed as 'intermediate production' such as financial 
transactions.

Therefore the ratio of wages to value-added is not an indicator of 
exploitation, but rather reflects a distributional struggle over the results of 
the process of production. It is therefore not surprising that Korea should 
experience an increase in the wage share of value added because the workers 
have been increasingly successful in the distributional struggle.

Bruce Cronin


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