In discussions and disputes about the standardization of wages, all sides deployed the rhetoric of fairness. A standardized wage meant a wage that fairly reflected the work done for it, however that was interpreted by various actors in specific cases. Standardized wages were also supposed to be transparent, making the criteria linking wage and work as clear and open as possible. In that sense, the standardized wage was close to the standardized product, representing a stable quantity of use value. In both cases standardization supposedly brought clarity and stability to things that seemed at risk of being opaque and arbitrary. Moreover, standardized wages and salaries, insofar as they came to be understood in terms of real “purchasing power,”
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