reparations & exploitation

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Mon Mar 12 11:10:18 PST 2001


Yo:
>>>Here we're talking about combat pay instead of productivity
>>>pay, which is quite a different sort of thing.

kelley:
>calling it combat pay is simply reproducing the very prejudices that make
>it combat pay in the first place. the lack of physicians in rural areas
>has everything to do with prestige, status, biases reinforced in medical
>training, etc. . as just one example.

Sure, but it's still a different sort of thing from judging workers on their productivity, because it's concrete, material, "objective", a quid pro quo where both the quid and the quo are well-defined. Even an anarcho-communist commune might give someone extra smooches for spending the winter checking on the health of the hermits in the north hills.

Justin Schwartz:
>I was talking about DIFFERENTIAL pay, for whatever the reason. And I do
>think incentive effects, another consequentialist consideration, are real.
>And, finally, I do think that people who work harder or contribute more (not
>the same thing) deserve more, another taht does not trump, and I recognize
>that measurement of those "more" factors is a very rough and ready
>proposition. But hasn't anyone here worked in a na environment where he or
>she had to pick up the work for a slacker who was being paid just as much
>(or more),a nd resented it? Didn't you think that person was in fact
>exploiting you? That is the experential basis of working class belief in
>productivity-based pay differentials.

You're seriously tempting me to post anecdotes to refute your argument -- anecdotes which, for all their vagueness, unreliability and unlocatability out in anecdote space do support my belief that responsibility for social production or the lack of it is beyond our powers of computation. Fortunately, with this message I have used up my lbo-quota for the day, and I cannot prolong this one, because I must quit slacking and get back to work.



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