The Socialist call for the “Abolition of the wages system” is usually met with derision. People, we are told, will only expend their physical and mental energies in exchange for a wage or a salary. Voluntary co-operative labour is a pipe-dream.
A few moments reflection will show this money crippled view of human beings to be wrong. We know of very many examples of our fellow human beings doing unpaid work – that is working for no monetary return.
Writing in The Guardian last year Michael White referred to Britain's generally thriving voluntary sector – one in three of us volunteer … and create £27.5bn worth of value to the economy.
In November 2003 the TUC reported that workers in the UK did £23 billion pounds of unpaid overtime. The average amount done each week by the more than 5 million workers performing unpaid overtime was 7 hours 24 minutes, worth £4,500 in extra annual salary. All the figures were taken from official statistics, and exclude employees who do less than one hour of unpaid overtime a week.
Last year the figure had increased to £26.9 billion.
The value of volunteers in UK sport in 1996 was reported to be £1.5 billion by Chris Gratton and Peter Taylor in Economics of Sport and Recreation.
Nor is this simply a strange quirk confined to Britain:
The value of that [unpaid] work ranges from 15 percent of gross domestic product in the case of Japan to 54 percent in Australia.
Marga Bruyn-Hundt in The Economics of Unpaid Work (1996) estimates the monetary value of unpaid labour in Netherlands ranges from six percent to 55 percent of GNP. Unpaid household and voluntary work takes over one and a half times more hours than paid work.
Depending on the method used the value of unpaid labour in Switzerland was at least 127,116 Mill. Fr. in 1997 equal to 34% GDP.
Even using conservative estimates, the magnitude of this [unpaid] labour is staggering. Kathleen Cloud and Nancy Garrett, specialists in global economic development, estimated the value of unpaid labour in 1990 for 132 different countries. They found that unpaid household labour contributed $8 trillion, or just over one-third of the total official GNP for these countries.
Who says that without wages people would not work?
GT
1 comment:
Not sure you can include unpaid overtime as not being motivated by money since I'd guess people don't do it for the fun of it, but because they are afraid they'll lose their job and income if they don't get the work done, or maybe to impress and get a promotion and raise.
Anyway, women have been expected to expend their physical and mental energies in unpaid domestic work for decades, surely its not too much to ask that men are capable of the same.
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