The Value of Human Labour in Relation to Inflation

I am many things at work and in life: An Health and Safety Officer, a Project Manager, a Technician, a Father and an ordinary man.

I am involved in ensuring that a job gets done both safely and with some degree of profit. I have a family to look after. So I have a duty to myself, my family and the lives of other people.

I am often the one who needs to look out for dangers that other do not see, read the fine-print nobody else has time for and generally have a different and/or opposing view of how to resolve a problem that is not adopted by the bosses or the workers.

But enough about that. My post title is about the Value of Human Labour. I only wanted to give the reader a bit of context to understand where I am coming from when I state my thoughts.

We have in our current society and economic systems a spiral of inflation when it comes to money. Goods and services end up costing more and more and it is extremely common for salaries to go up at a slower rate than the inflation rate.

This can only lead to a collapse.

Individually and privately we swallow these inconsistencies by lowering our standards and/or working more or additional jobs. Another way of dealing with it is to change jobs and go for something that earns you more money or start your own business to possibly earn more money.

But not all of those options are sustainably applied by everyone and not all of them can be applied indefinitely.

Thus, inflation like that will only lead to a collapse.

There are those people who are in a better financial situation than I am. I am constantly striving to improve my financial situation and I guess become one of those people. I am also intensely aware that by constantly striving to become better at making money and reach a better financial position that there will be someone else that does not do as well as I do.

So no matter how well I work and blog and save, what happens in the bigger picture is that there WILL be others who will end up without the basic needs for humans.

This issue exists across all people. It is not a question of race, religion or culture. There will be some people that will not manage to get sorted out and they shall be left destitute.

My viewpoint is that these people become desperate and they start committing some other sort of injustice because their values get thrown out the window when they get desperate.

Someone who is not willing to steal, deal in illegal goods or doing some other sort of illegal activity starts looking at those things as options when they are put into this situation. People, often women, lower their standards when put into these situations. Either they end up accepting the attention of men they would not normally consider in exchange for stability or they end up selling themselves in order to survive.

The rabbit hole goes further and things get much much darker than that. I do not need to go further on that path, but you know it exists.

So what happens is that these elements of society must predate on those who have more money. Those with a lot of money are generally not affected. They can pay for good security systems. It is a big industry in South Africa where crime is prevalent. You have lots of money so you pay for high walls, electric fences, cameras or even security guards.

Those in the middle class or lower middle often do not have the means of protection. Those of the lower class have zero protection and very often the poor steal from the poor.

So this causes more and more people to fall off the economic scale and this eventually causes the worth of the money that people offer to pay them to become.... worthless.

If you get paid less than $1 a day, which is what millions of people are living off, then what would you do?

I know that I would stop working.

Perhaps I have other ideas of what I would do in that situation but when you have hundreds or thousands such individuals in a city, what can you expect of your safety and society? What will happen when the rules and niceties of society break down?

Solutions?

It becomes important to understand the economic model and it becomes imperative that workers at all levels can at least be paid a living wage.

I have heard that regular fast-food servers in some European countries get a good pay, medical, vacation time and even a pension. Here and even in the USA this does not exist. They work for minimum pay and one single job is not enough to get along. They receive no medical, very little holiday time and zero other benefits.

It is not sustainable and it needs to change.

These are my thoughts for now and I am happy to have a conversation with others on this topic.

Thank you for your time.

Cheers!
@zakludick

Hive South Africa