>A claim that an hour of a surgeon's and an assembler's
>work produces a more or less equal value is ludicrous on its face.
It depends what stage in the surgeon's career we were to measure the output. In the early stages of the surgeon's career, during university and medical school, there is no obvious benefit in terms of medical value created by an hour of the surgeon's labour.
The would-be surgeon has to labour for a great many years before being capable of any surgery at all. Not just the person's individual labour as a medical student must be counted, but many hours of labour by instructors and a myriad of other highly trained support staff, all expending their labour for the goal of training the surgeon, must be expended before any obvious end-product eventuates. Tremendous labour value is concentrated in such highly trained specialists. The hour of the surgeon's actual trained work is the expression of perhaps hundreds of hours of socially-necessary labour that have been invested to make it all possible.
So an hour of the surgeon's work is more or less of equal value to an hour of anyone else's work. But the surgeon's work does not begin merely when the surgeon clocks on at the operating room the first day and is not even the labour of the surgeon alone. The value of the surgeon's hour of labour is the realisation of much more than the relatively untrained work of the assembly worker.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas