Anyone looking for a job – especially in the white-collar world – knows the business literature says they should show they ‘add value.’ The underlying reasoning? Companies search for value. They love it. They pay for it. If workers can show they add value, companies will give them a job and pay them big money.
This is a load of baloney. Let’s talk about why.
Individualism
First, it’s an individualistic strategy in a very social world. The business literature says workers need to stand out. I might note at the outset an opening tension. Companies tell people to ‘stand out’ by practicing things like ‘collaboration,’ also a key corporate value. Companies think of work as a collective project, yet they evaluate workers on how well they do outside of the whole.
But there’s a deeper problem under the opening tension. Asking workers to show how they ‘add value’ misrepresents how capitalism actually assigns wages. In fact, wages have almost nothing to do with whether workers add value. It’s a big fiction in a corporate world full of big fictions.
Add Value to Get Paid?
Second, let’s talk about how capitalism actually assigns wages. Companies ask employees to show they add value because they operate on a wage myth. Here’s how the myth goes: companies measure how much employees add value. Then, they pay ’em the value they add. A fair trade, right?
But that’s not how capitalism works. If it did work that way, companies would never profit. And then they’d all go out of business. In capitalism, employees usually produce more value than companies pay them. But even that isn’t the real issue here. The real issue is that companies don’t pay according to the value workers produce. Rather, companies pay workers according to the value of their labor power, i.e., their capacity to produce socially useful work.
That’s something else entirely. The value of labor power is what’s required to take care of the worker, to maintain the worker at a standard of living acceptable to society. Thus, the value of workers’ labor power is determined largely by social norms, rules, and judgments. And so, individual workers can’t do much to change it.
Society issues all sorts of judgments about how much people are worth. And it issues all sorts of different judgments for different social groups. And it issues these judgments independently from how much they add value at work.
Immigrants and Executives
Try comparing working-class immigrants in the U.S. to corporate executives. Immigrants add lots of value, notably in areas like the meatpacking industry in Iowa and the agricultural industry in the West. Furthermore, it’s not hard at all for immigrants to show they add value. They do it every day, and their employers know they do.
Does it help them get more money? For the most part, no. Why? U.S. society judges the value of their labor power quite low, i.e., the U.S. judges that they require a standard of living lower than that of most Americans. Supported by social prejudice and broader marginalization, companies pay them less. Companies use a social declaration of the low value of their labor power to justify holding down their wages and benefits. And none of this has anything to do with the value they add on the job.
Contrast all this to executives. CEOs and other senior executives usually don’t add value at all. Now, they can extract value. They can rework a company’s processes and rules to maximize the extraction of value from its workers. But there’s not much evidence they’re very good at doing so, at least not consistently good at it. And yet, they make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Even millions in some cases.
As with working-class immigrants, this has nothing to do with whether or not they add value. Society issues very different judgments about the value of CEOs’ labor power.
Reading the Business Literature
Readers know I have a bit of fun reading the business literature. It’s full of grifters and flimflam men coming up with moral and/or pseudo-scientific justifications for various means to extract value. Often along with an invitation to buy the author’s book or subscribe to their newsletter. If capitalism actually worked the way they say it does, accumulation – and therefore capitalism – would’ve never gotten off the ground in the first place, let alone survived.
This leaves us with the question of what people in the business literature are actually doing when they tell people to show they ‘add value.’ Here’s what I think is going on. First, they’re telling potential employees to show they can help the company extract value. They want employees to show they can, e.g., push other workers to increase productivity, et al.
Second, and most important of all, they’re telling potential employees to show their ‘social worth.’ Companies want them to send the right signals that they’re, e.g., socially worthy of a job and more money. The advice is to network, make the right friends, attend the right events. Shit like that. All these things count in the business world as ways of showing your worth.
I think that’s the biggest part of it.
