labour

labour, in economics, the general body of wage earners. It is in this sense, for example, that one speaks of “organized labour.” In a more special and technical sense, however, labour means any valuable service rendered by a human agent in the production of wealth, other than accumulating and providing capital or assuming the risks that are a normal part of business undertakings. It includes the services of manual labourers, but it covers many other kinds of services as well. It is not synonymous with toil or exertion, and it has only a remote relation to “work done” in the physical or physiological senses. The application of the physical energies of people to the work of production is, of course, an element in labour, but skill and self-direction, within a larger or smaller sphere, are also elements. A characteristic of all labour is that it uses time, in the specific sense that it consumes some part of the short days and years of human life. Another common characteristic is that, unlike play, it is not generally a sufficient end in itself but is performed for the sake of its product or, in modern economic life, for the sake of a claim to a share of the aggregate product of the community’s industry. Even the labourer who finds his chief pleasure in his work commonly tries to sell services or products for the best price that he can get.

If labour could be measured adequately in simple homogeneous units of time, such as labour-hours, the problems of economics would be considerably simplified. But labourers differ in the amount and character of their training, in their degree of skill, intelligence, and capacity to direct their own work or the work of others, and in the other special aptitudes that they require. Tasks differ in their irksomeness, in the prospects that they offer for permanent employment and advancement, in the social status associated with them, and in other characteristics that make one task more attractive than another. Apart from the circumstances that the mobility of labour is imperfect and that it cannot be transferred readily to the employments in which its products have the highest value, the wages of different kinds of labour cannot be taken to be payments for larger or smaller “quantities of labour.” The price per unit of time that a particular kind of labour commands in the market depends not only upon the technical efficiency of the labourer but also upon the demand for the particular services that he is able to furnish, upon their relative scarcity, and upon the supply of other productive agents. Thus, the attempts of the earlier economists and of some socialists to find a simple and direct relation between the value of a product and the quantity of labour that it embodies proved fruitless.

Different uses of the available supply of labour, whatever its composition, can be compared with reference to the quantity and the value of the product that they yield. Such comparisons are made continuously in the planning and management of competitive business undertakings. By means of economic analysis, it is often possible to know whether a proposed change in the organization of the community’s labour or in the uses to which it is put (as, for example, by encouraging certain types of industries at the expense of others) would be more likely to increase or to decrease the annual production of wealth. For the individual worker, as well as for the community as a whole, the practicable way of measuring the “labour costs” of production is by reference to the other products that might have been secured by means of the same labour or by reference to alternative uses of the time given to labour.