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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental unfairness of employment is that your masters skim off the top of your labor's true value and give you less than you are worth to line their pockets. The pilots are within the bounds of fairness to demand up to the full value of their labor.

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I am not taking sides in this dispute, I am sure the pilots do have some valid grievances. However "the full value of their labor" cannot be realized without a) planes to fly, b) a system for taking reservations, assigning people to seats, and collecting revenue, c) a maintenance staff to keep the planes functioning and safe, d) flight scheduling, purchasing/leasing gates at hundreds of airports (many international), financing fuel purchases, and much, much more.

Obviously, flying planes is a valuable skill. But without the enormous support system that the airline itself provides, pilots would have little opportunity to realize that value.

> Obviously, flying planes is a valuable skill. But without the enormous support system that the airline itself provides, pilots would have little opportunity to realize that value.

Then you're over-identifying what the value of their labor is. If what they need to do requires the support of others, don't factor the input of others into "the full value of their labor".

I.e. if the total value of the airline is X, and the value the pilots provides is P, and the value that all the other employees provide is N, where N + P = X, then the full value of the pilots labor is still P, not X. So I take it to mean they're wanting to get 100% of P.

>> N + P = X

It's much more complicated than that. One of the beautiful things about business, or any cooperative effort, is that the sum of the group/company is worth more than the sum of value of individual effort. 2+2=5, if you will.

The problem, when it comes to human nature, is that once the total value is determined (market cap, annual profit, ROI, etc), individuals tend to over-estimate the value of their individual contribution.

It is not just airlines. Uber drivers say they provide the rides, there would be no service without their effort. Uber says nobody was paying you to drive before we launched our platform. Both are correct. Foxconn employees say we're building all these damn iPhones, no other facility or workers can produce at this volume. Apple says if we didn't design and market such a popular product you'd have nothing to build. Again, both are correct. A film director says, look, the movie I made grossed $400 million -- and the studio replies, which you could have never made without the $100 million budget we risked, up front.

I have no position in this debate, but the exact valuation of their labour is basically exactly what's at stake here, right? Neoclassical economics would say their labour is worth the market price (ie what they're currently being paid, or else they could go find someone else to pay them more). Obviously that contains some simplifying assumptions but it is at least a point of view worth considering.

The neoclassical point of view is worth considering, but just like the much more scrutinized (by modern economists) labour theory of value, it has its fair share of criticisms from its Ricardian/Marxian proponents. A Marxian economist would say that the capacity to work, i.e labour-power, is (more or less, subject to fluctuation) is the value which when reflected in the price-form is the market price, but labour-power is not equal to labour, rather the use-value of labour-power is labour itself. The Marxian economist would say there are good reasons to believe that, either through a proof of the labour theory of value (though not necessarily a proof in the way of British positivism represented by Ricardo and J.S. Mill), a criticism of alternative models (neoclassical or Sraffian), empirical work on the correspondance between values and prices (such as Shaikh and Tonak's work) or explanation of the dual character of labour (as concrete and abstract) which reflects the essence which makes its way to appearance in surface phenomena (prices).

I don't mean to be a proponent of that view (at least not in this comment) but that might be where the parent comment is coming from.

Getting “the full value of their labor” would leave no surplus to cover capital depreciation or other people in the airline’s wages, or to pay the airline’s debts or capital costs, or to allow the airline to bank cash for a rainy day.

In many cooperative enterprises, like the historical Cherokee communal farming set-up, people set aside some of the value of what they produce to (a) cover miscellaneous capital costs and (b) be provide a reserve. The pilots should be producing a little more than they receive; otherwise the airline would collapse the next time a flight got delayed and people had to be put up in a hotel.

You’ve just described the history of the US airline sector. Every 30 years financiers forger what an awful investment airlines are and invest money into subsidizing price wars and expansions. It looks like there’s rising profits, the pilots’ unions get generous raises and then competition gets vicious and the profits disappear and the airlines go bankrupt.

> The fundamental unfairness of employment is that your masters skim off the top of your labor's true value

Sure, that's why we see so many pilots selling direct to consumers, right?

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