Parenti and Labor

Chris Johnson
During high school I always stayed busy playing a lot of sports so if I wanted to try and make a little extra money on the side; it was pretty hard for me to find a job that would fit around my schedule. During one off season a friend of mines dad was given the contract of cleaning the local elementary school so he began searching for workers. Since it was something that worked well with my schedule I decided to do it, and I essentially became a “janitor”. The job was pretty easy; we would drive over after school and just divide all of the work up and make sure everything was clean. Although my friend’s dad was in charge, I rarely ever saw him except for the occasional drop in to tell us what we doing wrong. We were paid like $7 an hour which wasn’t terrible at the time, but I guarantee you that my friends dad was also making a pretty good amount…for doing almost nothing. This type of thing happens everywhere in our capitalist society. Workers do all of the work, while it’s the people who are higher level that enjoy all of the benefits of the work. In class we talked about Perenti and his ideas on our capitalist economy. He found that the average private sector employee works 2hrs for themselves and 6 or more hours for their boss. With capitalism workers are paid substantially more than the value they create, and corporations exploit their labor in order to accumulate capital. How is it that people can work so hard but get paid so little? The fact is that workers are doing the work of two or three people, and only getting paid barely enough for their own. So if labor is so important to accumulating capital, why do things like this continue to happen?