The Wage

an anatomy in sixteen plates

“The real price of every thing … is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”
Adam Smith · The Wealth of Nations · 1776

“… a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man.”
Leo XIII · Rerum Novarum · 1891

The Argument

What is a wage? This folio answers the question sixteen times over. Each of the first fifteen plates takes the wage up from a single side — as a moral fact, a price for time, a pledge, a measure, a master, an insurance, and ten things more — and finds in it a different essence, every one of them true. The sixteenth gathers the others and argues that the wage has no single essence at all: it is the one number at which a human life and the economy that pays for it are made to meet, and so it is moral and mechanical at once, free and compelled, personal and systemic, irreducibly all of these. The plates were struck in the order set down here, but each stands alone and may be read in any. Together they are an anatomy of the most ordinary number in a working life — the price of an hour, and so of a portion of a person.

The Plates

i The Just Wagevalue — the moral fact beneath the price

ii The Price of Timetime — the hour, made sellable by the clock

iii The Wagertrust — performed first, and paid in arrears

iv The Commonsnecessity — a floor traded for a door

v The Rangeamount — between floor and ceiling, decided by power

vi The Unwagedboundary — what counts as work, and what does not

vii The Ratchetrigidity — the one price that will not fall

viii The Measurethe numéraire — the measure beneath all prices

ix The Masterauthority — the obedience the wage buys

x The Insurancerisk — a fixed claim; the worker’s insurance

xi The Machinetechnology — the wage’s oldest rival

xii The Callingmeaning — it prices the work, not its worth

xiii The Demanddemand — every wage is also an income

xiv The Leisurelabour-supply — the price of an hour of a life

xv The Diplomathe skill premium — does it build, or signal?

— and the binding —

xvi The Sumthe gathering — one number, many natures

Sixteen plates, struck under the sign of Numéraire, on a single small word and the world folded inside it. The argument is open. Here the folio begins.