Birth Strike by Jenny Brown

Author:Jenny Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2019-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

CHEAP LABOR

Is it really true that the fewer workers there are, the higher their pay will be, and the more workers there are, the lower their pay will be? This seems to be what the financial press is insisting when they warn of higher labor costs due to low birth rates. It’s a simple case of supply and demand, they seem to be saying. But is it true? The idea goes back at least to Adam Smith, the “father of economics.” Smith, writing in Scotland in 1776, thought that the “invisible hand” of the market controlled the price of labor by determining the survival of children. The greater the supply of laborers, he reasoned, the lower the price of labor. He writes that “poverty, though it does not prevent the generation, is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children. The tender plant is produced, but in so cold a soil and so severe a climate, soon withers and dies. It is not uncommon, I have been frequently told, in the Highlands of Scotland for a mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive.”1

Smith argues that when workers are scarce, employers are forced to increase their pay, allowing families to live in better conditions and more children to survive to adulthood. The resulting increase in workers leads wages to fall again, starving some and restoring a macabre equilibrium:

The reward of labor must necessarily encourage in such manner the marriage and multiplication of laborers…. If the reward at any time should be less than what was requisite for this purpose, the deficiency of hands would soon raise it; and if it should at any time be more, their excessive multiplication would soon lower it to this necessary rate…. It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that of any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men; quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast.2

Nearly a hundred years later, Karl Marx argued against this view, saying that the survival rate of children could in no way account for the rapid fluctuations in the demand for labor, along with fluctuations in the price of labor, which he saw all around him in 1860s industrial Europe.

Corporate owners hire more people when there is paying demand for their products, the boom part of the boom-and-bust cycle characteristic of capitalism. When demand becomes slack, they lay them off. Since the boom-bust cycle takes place every ten years or so, Marx argued, population cannot be a factor leading to these wild swings, because population cannot be produced that rapidly.3

Instead of blaming the workers for having too many children, Marx blamed the tendency of capital to make more than it could sell, because it failed to pay the workers enough to buy the product of their own labor. Needed goods piled up in warehouses because people didn’t have enough money to purchase them. Workers lined up desperate for employment, not because they were too numerous, but because capital developed a periodic incapacity to use them.

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