Compensation Rates between Skilled and Manual Labor

December 30, 2012

I am motivated to do work, but I am also motivated to understand why I work. I usually know what I am working to accomplish, and that is an important factor in this explanation of compensation rates. It is rarely easy to connect why I work with what the work produces for me personally, while what I work for an employer to accomplish is easily connected to what the work produces for society, and the persons in it, personally. There have been years while others asked me how I can justify studying and call it work, and I have asked the question why some wealthy persons can collect larger salaries than persons who can demonstrate the amount of work they do using the simple physics formula of Work is equal to force times distance. Using their bodies to apply force to some object of mass and move it over a distance quantifies that work, but the same could not be as easily found for a philosopher or a manager or an executive, most commonly known as pencil pushers. Within the definition of Force is found a term for mass, and contrasting a pencil with, for example, a pallet of merchandise, and keeping in mind the difference in masses between the two, the result is more work done by moving the pallet than the pencil. The manual laborer should then be paid more than the executive or scientist, etc. if the belief that wages should be proportional to the amount of work done is correct. I now postulate that without reasons beyond wages and benefits received as compensation from an employer, those necessary to sustenance, the manual worker would not work for an employer, especially under a supervisor or boss. By providing those reasons to work to the consciousness of the workers and the public, only one of them being what the work is done to accomplish for society, the reasoning of the one who reasons justifies the worker to the public and the work to the worker. A worker cannot work without the justification of his or her beliefs except under compulsory circumstances, and so a manager or a scientist or a philosopher, etc. becomes, through his or her reasoning in the public domain, a part of the force that the worker draws on and applies through his psyche to move the mass or object over a distance. The manual laborer’s work can be measured in terms of force and distance, but a confident, inspired, and justified worker, one with just and favorable conditions of work including the condition of his or her beliefs, increases the amount of work through his or her faith in what he or she does or is doing, and such a worker is said to have a good attitude. When inspiration and justification are correctly supplied to the psyche of a laborer, then his or her share of work increases and so should his or her compensation. Management that can create a good attitude claims a share of the laborer’s work as its own, and since what they provide is used by so many workers, a small share of each worker’s contribution eventually sums to more than the average manual laborer’s rate of compensation.