michael perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
at the bottom of the chain of
subcontracting, the fee is only four cubic dollars per yard
At least they're getting paid in cubic dollars. Or did you mean to say "cube-root dollars"? This is what they call in corporate jargon "adding value". A total value of $20 per cubic yard is "added" by Halliburton and the other middle men. By the way, Henry Mayhew included an early and scathing report on the middle man system in his London Labour and the London Poor.
The colloquial name for this system of sub-sub-sub-contracting was "lump work" and the Oxford dictionary credits Mayhew with the first literary usage of the term. That's lump work as in lump-of-work, otherwise known as a lump-of-labor.
It's clear that a substantial excess of
unemployment is essential for the sub-sub-sub-contracting racket to thrive and it seems not unreasonable to me to suspect that the public policies that enable the racket are in place precisely because they enable the elaboration of an ever longer "value-adding chain" that is, of course, hailed as GDP growth.
The Sandwichman