Disposable workers: today's reserve army of labor

Monthly Review, April, 2004 by Fred Magdoff, Harry Magdoff

The Reserve Army of Labor

One of the central features of capitalism is the oversupply of labor, a large mass of people that enter and leave the labor force according to the needs of capital. During an upswing in the business cycle, additional labor is necessary to utilize a business's full capacity. As sales slacken during a recession, workers no longer needed are then dismissed. The reserve army of labor--with brief and very unusual exceptions--is always present. Under the exceptional conditions of the Second World War, there was full employment in the United States because it was necessary to expand the labor supply for the war effort. This was accomplished partially by bringing large numbers of women into the labor force. Full employment was reached at a time when 11 million people were in the armed forces and thus not part of the labor force.

When considering the surplus of workers in the reserve army of labor, it is important constantly to keep in mind two points. First, there is not an absolute surplus population, but rather a surplus in the context of a society ruled by the profit motive and the golden rule of accumulation for the sake of accumulation. Second, there would be no surplus of labor if everyone had enough to eat, a decent place to live, health care, and education, and workers had shorter work hours and longer vacations so they could have more leisure and creative time.

Business owners or CEOs protect and maintain the structural and mechanical parts of their operations, even when not fully utilized (or not used at all) because of insufficient demand. Capitalists take care of their buildings--factories, offices, and stores--and the various pieces of machinery and equipment are usually serviced and maintained regardless of business conditions. Workers, on the other hand, are disposable. Capital wants to obtain labor and use it when needed, and layoff workers when they aren't needed. Treating labor as a disposable and/or easily replaceable part of the production process promotes capitalism's central driving force--the never-ending drive to accumulate wealth. It is of critical importance to the functioning of capitalism as a system because it enables individual capitalists to change course quickly in response to changing economic conditions.

What economic sense could it make for a capitalist to pay a workforce to do little or no work during a recession? What business sense would it make for a farmer to pay a person year-round when all that's needed is extra labor during a short harvest period? The argument could be made that there are certain individuals that have key skills and employers would be well served by paying these persons through a slack period to insure that they would be available when demand for the product or service begins to grow again. To some extent this happens, but the reserve army also includes technical workers--computer scientists, engineers, and technicians--so it is possible to find ready replacements for many seemingly irreplaceable workers.