this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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To be sure it’s apples to oranges imo. But, I think, an analogy can be drawn.
Maybe a more accurate way to think about it is that the parking space is worth more to the owner of that company than I am to my current boss at 22.50 us dollars per hour.
And that feels more like apples to apples.
But only because there is an actual limited and finite number of parking spots in any given area… unfortunately the less specialized a position is the greater number of people there are to take it… and with 8+ billion people on the earth odds are good you can be relatively easily replaced even at higher skill level jobs…
And FTR I am not justifying the poor wages of the working class (i.e. almost everyone who isn’t a boomer or a “rich” person)… but this comparison is a little foolish and fails at making the point the OP wanted to make… we’re stuck in Capitalism. Supply and demand. There can be no more parking spaces in certain places but we’re constantly making new people…
There are a limited number of people who can exist within working distance of any given space - doubly so in developed countries. The distinction is not so different as it seems at first. Supply and demand is constrained by physical realities - there is a reason why there was a great movement in the 1950s to increase the mobility of labor - because labor, even unskilled labor, is still immensely valuable in the right place. That there are more people in Bumfuck, Alabama, doesn't matter one whit to Toronto, Canada. That there is an (effectively) infinite amount of food that can be coaxed from the ground doesn't make food worthless - time, space, and demand all give it worth.
The issue is, labor is generally in a very poor negotiating position considering our needs as human beings and our limited resources with which we can sustain ourselves, whereas commodities and capital are generally owned by the rich, who have much more leverage to bargain with each other.
The supply of unskilled labor vastly outstrips the demand for it, which keeps prices on unskilled labor low
So you say, but just think back to several months ago, when all anyone could talk about was the labor shortages in the US and the ever present tagline "Nobody wants to work anymore". So forgive me if I don't really believe you that supply vastly outstrips demand.
As a general statement, that might be the common conception. But the truth of the matter is, no matter how much supply of labor there is, and no matter how much demand there is for labor, if the conditions aren't actually desirable, the labor is not going to work for any price someone with an ego sets. People seem to forget that when you're talking about supply and demand that there are lower bounds. Even basic theories like supply and demand do break down when they get too distant from the reality it is supposed to be modelling.