Our jobs

One may wonder how much would our salaries be if there weren’t collective agreements and other regulations to protect the workers. The image is perhaps familiar to all those engaged in the so called left winged defense of public services, as a counter image. In these ranks there is a widespread notion that capitalist earnings are based on the exploitation of workers in the sense of having them with lower wages and worse working conditions. What capitalists misappropriate this way would amount to the illegitimate part of their profits in a company (it is no longer affirmed that it would amount to the bulk of those profits). But one should ask himself if there cannot be an interest on the part of the companies and capital owners that workers are well provided so that their job can yield more. We are told that in such a case, it is a matter of holding back the social unrest. We cannot deny something of that sort, mainly in countries with a totalitarian trend. But the point, dishonestly overlooked by all those that scorn at Marx’s prediction of a continuous increase of the exploitation of the working class, is that work yields more when done by workers skilled and well paid than when done by the host of precarious population precariously trained. And this is the step lacking: it yields more, and that means that it is subject to a bigger exploitation. This is the real interest that supports and justifies the concern of governments with education, one should rather say, to block the dangerous ambivalence in the word, the concern with high professional qualification. Without that, no real job market, but an artificial one held up by a hunchbacked eyesore, a restricted competence in a mixture of company and totalitarian State, a company offering services to the bigger and more powerful companies in the international arena. This is probably the case for each and every one of the countries in the world (maybe qua countries), whose battle is perhaps no longer an external one for the enlargement or protection of the national territories, that is markets, but an internal one for the provisional maintenance of a legal and social reliability to accommodate the investments and to provide the expected kind of workers. The big market is still using a diversity of false markets that disguise it.