… is from pages 45-46 of Angus Black’s 1970 book, A Radical’s Guide to Economic Reality (original emphasis):
All it takes are some workers who find out that they’re being underpaid. Some of them might move to areas of higher wages and leave exploiting Capitalists with too few workers. To get these necessary extra workers, wages will have to be raised.
Even if workers don’t take the time to find out about better-paying jobs, greedy Capitalists will make them aware of these opportunities. Why? Because you can trust a profiteer to buy the cheapest labor possible. If workers happen to be relatively cheaper in an adjoining city it pays some Capitalists to offer them slightly higher wages as an inducement for some of them to change location. Profit-hungry employers fight for the cheapest labor around tend to drive wages up to normal.
DBx: So true.
I wonder how many are the people who argue, on one hand, that employers are so greedy for cheap labor that they – employers – too quickly move their operations overseas to ‘exploit’ such labor, but then argue also, on the other hand, that domestic labor markets are filled with monopsony power. This pairing of arguments reflects inconsistency of thought of those who make the pairing.
