A common idea, both in ordinary discourse and in the desert literature, is that wages can be deserved. The thought is not only highly intuitive, but it is also often appealed to in order to explain various injustices in employment income – pay gaps, for instance. In this paper, I challenge the idea that income from employment is the kind of thing that can be deserved. I argue that once one gets clear on the metaphysics of jobs and wages within the context of economic exchange more generally, there are natural principles concerning such exchanges which generate puzzles for that view. The puzzles, I argue, are especially acute for meritocrats who conceive of justice in wages in terms of desert. Additionally, I argue that appealing to dignity (rather than desert) offers better hope of explaining the kinds of injustices in wages that motivate the appeal to desert. In that case, no explanatory gap is left by abandoning the idea that wages can be deserved either, and so, I argue, we have good reason to doubt it.

This study relies on a linear programming model to estimate welfare ratios in Spain between 1600 and 1800. This method is used to find the food basket that guaranteed the intake of basic nutrients at the lowest cost. The estimates show that working families in Toledo had higher welfare ratios than in those in Barcelona. In addition, the welfare ratios of Spain were always below those of London and Amsterdam. The divergence between Northern Europe and Spain started before the Industrial Revolution and increased over time.

Most truck drivers experience economic pressure in the form of low pay rates, no pay for non-driving work time, and long work hours. Unpaid working time, leading to low effective pay rates, encourages drivers to work excessive hours to pursue target earnings, which leads to fatigue and working time violations, and ultimately raises crash rates. This paper explores the complex relationship between regulatory violations, pay incentives, and crashes, to determine the effects of economic forces on carrier safety. We use data from 13,904 intrastate trucking companies in the United States, as well as median hourly truck driver wages from data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We find that controlling for observed regulatory violations (hours of service, unsafe driving, and substance abuse), at the mean, 1% higher driver wages are associated with 1.04% fewer crashes. Stated differently, a 10% wage increase would be 5 times as effective as a 10% reduction in ‘unsafe driving’ or 2.5 times as effective as a 10% reduction in ‘driver fitness’ violations. This unit elasticity between driver pay and crashes suggests that higher compensation will bring direct and commensurate worker and public safety benefits. Every unit in higher pay, at the mean, will lead to a corresponding unit improvement in safety. Our findings suggest that the most effective way for regulators to pursue their mission to reduce crashes, fatal or otherwise, would be to collect firm-level data on truck driver compensation and allow their methodology to follow sound science.

Foundling hospitals spread across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, taking in hundreds of thousands of children each year. In Spain, the hospitals of major cities had staffs of more than 1,000 external wet nurses, who worked mainly in rural localities. Their cash wages were key for the household economies of the poor rural and urban populations. This article presents a methodology to interpret wet-nurse wages and explains their utility with respect to other occupations for men and women. Our results include a series of nominal and real wages for wet nurses and a calculation of their contributions to family income. The level of wages these institutions could offer was a major determinant in the supply of wet-nurse labour.

Chinese domestic rural–urban migrant workers have played a substantial role in economic development since the late 1970s. This article makes an attempt to establish a two-period hiring model interpreting the impact mechanism of social networks on migrant workers’ wages. The findings indicate that the extension of social networks of both firms and workers facilitates a decrease in the information gap between them and improves extra common benefits to both.

The rise of wages in China would seem to indicate that the demographic dividend has reached its end. A more refined approach reveals, however, that the situation of Chinese workers has not really improved: even though real wages are rising, the share of wages in the nation’s wealth has not kept pace. The reason for this is China’s position within global value chains, where the employment relationship is not solely governed by the employer–employee power relationship, but by contractual relations established between ‘lead firms’ and subcontractors. This situation echoes labour institutional economist JR Commons’ concept of ‘competitive menace’ and analyses of the structural imbalance of power in the employer/employee relationship. We argue that despite the Chinese government’s desire for industrial upgrading and its intention to develop internal labour markets, Chinese labour institutions have shown significant resistance to change making it hard to envisage any shift towards a Fordist regime of capital accumulation based on a virtuous cycle of mass production and mass consumption.

Large truck crashes remain a significant problem in the truckload sector of the US motor carrier industry. Employing a unique firm-level data set from a large US truckload motor carrier, we identified two different driver groups hired during two distinct pay regimes. Before-and-after data on wages and safety outcomes created a natural experiment. Higher wages paid to experienced drivers in the new pay regime led to higher driver retention rates. Experienced drivers had lower average crash costs and were more productive during each tenure month. Experienced drivers had a much larger expected discounted net present value when compared with inexperienced drivers. As the previously inexperienced drivers gained additional experience, their crash probabilities and their value began to mirror those of the experienced drivers, demonstrating the value of greater tenure. This research supports ‘safe rates’ public policy because safety pays – for trucking companies, for cargo owners and for society.

This paper builds an estimation model to test whether improved labour standards necessarily lead firms to send work offshore to countries with lower wages and fewer employment protections; or improved labour standards influence the labour market, where with time, firms attract more skilled workers, which help deter outward foreign direct investment (FDI). When more firms comply with improved labour standards, the industrial relations climate also improves as non-compliance usually causes labour unrest. Using a model built on pooled cross-sectional time-series data from 2008–17, we studied the role of changes in labour unrest and the percentage of skilled workers in the labour force in predicting outward FDI in Taiwan. Per our estimation model, we found the percentage of skilled workers steadily increased as Taiwan maintained improved labour standards. The increase in skilled workers also increased labour costs making it challenging for firms to stay onshore. However, skilled workers helped firms improve productivity, which justified increased labour costs. As a result, firms in Taiwan that complied with labour standards found it less challenging to pay higher wages and stayed onshore.

Skills that are difficult to automate are expected to increase in demand and reward according to skill-biased technological change advocates, who have identified high rewards for cognitive and social skills. However, such broad skill categories involve numerous essential competencies that can be differentially rewarded or go simply unrewarded. Using US data, this article analyses the demand for and payment of linguistic competency, a cross-cutting kind of skill that is basic for both cognitive and social work in the new economy and is one of the human capacities that is most difficult to automate. While human capital theory predicts an increase in wages as the demand for linguistic skills rises, from cultural/institutional perspectives, it can be theorised that communicative abilities and foreign-language knowledge are socially undervalued because of their association with feminised activities, ethnicity, and low-status service jobs. We analyse the demand and reward for linguistic skills through a two-step analysis of occupational and individual data derived from two sources: the Occupational Information Network and the Current Population Survey. Results show that while ‘hard’ verbal-reasoning skills are associated with high average salaries, as is predicted by neoclassical theory, the potentially undervalued linguistic skills – interactive and multilingual skills – are unrewarded and even penalised. This evidence requires further political attention, given its implications for large number of workers, especially in feminised, low-status service jobs.

After nearly two decades of rising wages for those in the unskilled sectors of China's economy, in the mid-2010s employment and wages in China began to experience new polarizing trends. Using data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China, this paper examines trends in multiple sectors and subeconomies of China, revealing the substantial rise of employment in informal, low-skilled services as well as the steady decline of wage growth in the informal subeconomy. At the same time, we find that although employment growth in the formal subeconomy is relatively moderate, wage growth in high-skilled services is steadily rising. These two trends pose a challenge for China, presenting a new and uncertain period of economic change.

This article constitutes a critique of abstraction as an analytic tool. The argument advances the idea that formalizing practices are indexical; that is, the way abstractions are realized necessarily incorporates features of the context in which they are produced. The expression formalizing practices refers to a series of actions or operations that make quantification, rationalization, and standardization possible. Entailed in all these procedures is an attempt to select and isolate features that exemplify a specific phenomenon or social process, or in the case of standardization, that stipulate its contours and dimensions. These features are presumed to be immanent from the start, but in fact, formal representations are carefully crafted, finely tuned instruments. In order to clarify these practices, I delineate three phases of their construction: the conceptual phrase, the choice of analytic strategy, and the specification of its formal representation. In other words, this approach suggests the value of examining formalizing projects as crucibles where cultural assumptions and practical reasoning are condensed into formulae. These ideas are explored in relation to the use of time and motion studies employed in early socialist Hungary to determine the new socialist wage system. While a decidedly local story, the implications of the analysis are much broader. The possibility of adopting this approach to the study of other formalizing practices, such as algorithmic systems and digital databases, is suggested. The analysis also raises questions about the commensurability of long-held concepts in social theory.