There have been various ways of thinking about what constitutes a fair wage, and various schemes for implementing diferent conceptions of fair compensation. For some economists, fair wages are just those delivered by the untrammeled operation of market forces. The marginalists, for example, held that, under free market conditions, wages reflect the value of labor’s contribution to the product. Because, according to this view, wages simply measure the value labor adds to output, they are fair by definition. For some labor activists and radical political economists, by contrast, fair wages are those that capture the full value of the product, on the grounds that only labor creates value. The way in which labor has been used to calculate wage rates in practice has varied across time and place. Compensation has been figured, for example, as a rate for discrete physical actions per unit of work time or, alternatively, in terms of labor’s material output, in the form of piece rates (Biernacki 1995).
What the diferent ways of thinking about and determining fair compensation for work under capitalism have in common, however, is a conception of fairness as objectively measurable. That is, fairness is regarded not as a matter of convention or custom but, rather, as an objective fact about an exchange, rooted in the properties of the substances being exchanged. An exchange is objectively fair, in this view, when a rational observer, without knowledge of the specifics of the set of norms governing the exchange, would judge it to be so. For example, the exchange between feudal lord and vassal, free peasant, or serf might be entirely in accordance with custom and therefore conventionally proper. A modern observer, however, would be unlikely to judge feudal exchange as fair, because of the apparent disparity in the services exchanged (not to mention the degree of coercion involved) and the apparently arbitrary nature of the underlying convention. Similarly, modern conceptions of fair economic exchange are quite diferent from the customary rates of pay described by historians as typical of the early industrial period (Hobsbawm 1964). This is not to say that within a customary framework, the subaltern party would necessarily consent to what would appear to modern eyes to be an unequal exchange—feudal peasants, for example, certainly expressed discontent, and not infrequently rebelled. But resistance tended to be justified in terms of the violation of other conventions and customs. For example, in late medieval and early modern England there was a counterhegemonic discourse, deployed against both feudalism and nascent capitalism, that asserted the customary rights of “free-born Englishmen.”3 Similarly, in England, enclosure was resisted on the basis of customs established “since time immemorial” and “beyond memory of any man,” which gave commoners right of access to resources such as grazing lands (E. P. Thompson 1993; Wood 1997).4
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