Why the bosses pay Blacks, Latinos, and women less

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Workers who are women, Black, Latino, "illegal aliens," or otherwise discriminated against in our society, receive significantly less pay. Women's wages, for example, are only 60 percent of men's.

Why is this? And what can be done about it?

It's pretty obvious that the capitalist owners of industry, who pay our wages, directly benefit from this state of affairs. Every penny they do not pay out in wages goes directly into their pockets as extra profits.

Since we are talking about approximately half the working class, these extra profits are enormous, amounting to billions and billions of dollars each year.

But how do the capitalists get away with it?

To get a handle on this question we should step back and take a look at what wages are under this capitalist system.

Under capitalism, pretty nearly everything in an economic sense is a commodity. Commodities are the goods that are bought and sold in the market.

The commodity the capitalists buy in the market by paying wages is workers—us-for a certain number of hours each day. That's right, we are commodities, and we go into the labor market to sell ourselves.

More precisely, what we sell the capitalists in exchange for our wages is our ability to work, which the capitalists then put to use to produce whatever commodities the individual capitalist enterprises make.

What determines the value of this special commodity, the workers' ability to work? Like all other commodities, its value is determined by how much labor time is needed to produce it.

The labor time needed to produce the worker's ability to work is measured by the labor time needed to produce all the commodities the worker needs to live and to raise the next generation of workers. It is the value of the food, clothing, shelter, and all the other things the worker needs.

But just what does a worker need? This is an elastic concept. There is a minimum below which the worker can't physically survive at all. The workers fight to get more than that, to have enough to have some life as human beings over and above being cogs in the capitalists' productive machine. The capitalists seek to pay the lowest wages possible, because that leaves more left over for profits.

The actual wage level is a result of the ever-continuing battle between the workers and capitalists over this issue.

When white workers are paid more than Black workers, what that means is that the value of white workers' ability to work is considered higher than that of Black workers. When men are paid more than women, the same thing is true.

What this boils down to is capitalist society telling Blacks and women: Your needs are less than those of whites and of men, so you get less money. Since this is preposterous objectively, it can only work if there is a general assumption in society that Blacks and women are not worth as much, they are inferior.

This assumption must be held not only by the ruling rich, but by large sections of the workers themselves, including those discriminated against.

Thus the first step toward equality in wages under capitalism happens when those discriminated against begin to stand up and say "I am a human being too! I am not worth less than anyone! I will fight for all my rights!"

The fight for equal pay is part and parcel of the fight for equality generally, and cannot be separated from it.

Let's take the fight for the right to abortion, for example. The capitalist class is trying to take this right away from women. Without this right, women cannot control their own bodies and lives. If they cannot do that, they cannot be equal with men. If they are not equal with men, their value on the labor market will be less than men's.

A word is in order on the slogan "equal pay for equal work." This has been used as a way to say that women and Blacks should get equal pay with men and whites, since the work they do is equivalent. So far so good.

But it can also lead to a trap. All work should be valued equally. If we get into the game of trying to define which type of work is just as good as another, we begin to accept that some work is better than others. Using the demand for equal pay for equal work, I've heard the argument that the work of a legal secretary is better than that of a janitor, and so is deserving of higher wages. The same old crap of denying the equal needs of the janitor rises to the surface.

Our demand should be "equal pay." This demand is in the interests of the so-called privileged white male worker, too.

A sorry sight to see is a male worker who thinks that because a women gets paid less, he gets paid more. What a sucker!

To think that if the capitalist gets away with paying a women worker less, that means the capitalist will turn around and give the difference to her male coworker instead of pocketing it himself is like believing in the tooth fairy.

In fact, the lower wages paid to women and Blacks lowers the wage of the white male. This is because under capitalism, all workers are competing with each other. Lower wages for some workers are just like lower prices for some oranges on the market. The higher price on other oranges tends to fall. So the wages of the white male suffer, too, even if they are greater than those of women and Blacks.

More generally, workers are in a weak position facing the capitalists as individuals. When they band together, as in a union, they suppress the competition among themselves and can bargain with the capitalists from a position of greater strength.

It is in the interests of all workers to fight against sexist and racist discrimination, against all notions drummed into our heads by capitalist society that some workers are inferior to others. This is the only road to working class unity, and unity is our only strength.

Capitalism inherited the oppression of women from previous class societies. But it has incorporated it and refined it according to its own rules.

Racism arose with the beginning of capitalism, and developed as a justification for the suppression of the darker-colored majority of humanity by a handful of rich capitalist nations. It also arose as a justification of the slave trade and slave system in the Americas that was an integral component of the rise of capitalism.

But the abolition of slavery didn't eradicate racism, which continued to flourish under capitalism and according to its rules, just as the oppression of women has. Racism and sexism cannot be abolished root and branch until the capitalist system itself is abolished. The fight against racism and sexism is part of this longer-term struggle.

This brings us back to the question of the unity of the working class, for it is only through this unity that the whole system of wage slavery and all its evil consequences will be overthrown and replaced by a socialist society of equal men and women of all nations and colors.

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