Dad: Can I try explaining my book to you? It’ll be good practice — plain language instead of the fancy words I use with my colleagues at the university.
Daughter: Yes, of course.
Dad: Thank you! Okay, where to start…
My book is basically about something I think is really unfair. I’ll start with this: Most people have a job to earn money, and that money pays for things — a house, groceries, holidays. But it wasn’t always like that. A long time ago, people mostly made things they used themselves. Maybe a small farm to grow tomatoes, a boat to catch fish, or a potter’s wheel, like the one at your school, to make plates and cups.
There’s a longer story in between, but fast forward to today: most of us don’t have the land, the tools, or even the knowledge to make these things ourselves anymore. So we work for a boss instead. We work, we earn money, and with that money we buy things other people made.
And here’s the unfair part: how much effort we each put into our work, how much time, how much focus, how much energy. Do you follow?
Daughter: Not really. Why is time unfair?
Dad: Okay, let’s see… Workers are always haggling with their bosses about how much work they have to squeeze into a day. Bosses want more done; we push back, because more work means more stress, maybe more evenings and weekends working instead of hanging out with you.
Let’s use an example to picture it. I work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, all year except holidays. For those hours, I get paid a salary. With that money, I buy things other workers spent their own time making. So in one day, I work 8 hours, and I earn enough to pay for a house, heating, food, clothes — stuff that maybe took other people only 6 hours to make.
Daughter: Wait, that’s unfair to YOU! You worked 8 hours for that!
Dad: Exactly. Now let’s test your maths. Say it took 500 hours to build our house, and 8 people worked on it during that time. How many hours of work does the house represent?
Daughter: Is it 500 times 8? That’s… 4,000 hours!
Dad: Correct! We call that the labour value of the house. Now, our house is over 100 years old — about 40,000 days. If we spread those 4,000 hours across all those days, how many hours of labour value do we “use up” each day?
Daughter: Is that 4,000 divided by 40,000?
Dad: Yes.
Daughter: 0.1?
Dad: Look at you! Exactly right. So every day we live here, we use about 0.1 hours of labour value just from the house. You could do the same maths for food, water, electricity, clothes, gas, internet — everything. Maybe it all adds up to 6 hours of labour value a day. It’s really hard to calculate exactly, but we don’t need the exact number to understand how it works.
And it’s not only things you can touch, like bread or toys. Services count too. I teach — that’s a service. Someone driving a taxi is selling a service too.
Daughter: But could it go the other way? You work 8 hours, but the stuff you buy took 9 or 10 hours to make?
Dad: Absolutely! Well spotted. Though it’s much more common for it to go the other way. In our economy, most people work to earn money to buy things. But there’s a smaller group of people who own the farms, the factories, the university, a bunch of taxis — you name it. And they don’t have to work as much. Say you own a factory with machines and tools. You hire workers to actually do the work and make the things that get sold.
Daughter: But the boss still needs money to hire the workers in the first place.
Dad: True, but the boss earns that money by selling what the workers make.
Daughter: And he keeps some for himself?
Dad: Yes, that’s called profit. Say the boss sells 100 euros of stuff in a day. He pays the workers 80 and keeps 20.
Daughter: But where does he get the stuff to sell before he even has workers?
Dad: Great question! Usually, he borrows money from a bank, which means he has to pay some back too. So out of that 100 euros: 80 goes to the workers, 5 to the bank, and 15 stays with him to take it easy.
Daughter: Got it!
Dad: So here’s the big idea: most people work to earn money to buy things they didn’t make themselves, made by other people in factories and everywhere else. And a small group owns those factories and can often work less.
Daughter: And still earn money.
Dad: Exactly. Or they still work, just less. Maybe 4 hours, while the workers do 8.
Daughter: Wait, what does the boss even DO in those 4 hours?
Dad: Mostly things like visiting the bank, or hiring people, or handling payments. Nothing like a shift on the factory floor. So like you said earlier, sometimes people work fewer hours than it took to make the stuff they buy. That’s the boss. He works less to get things that took more hours to make.
There’s one more twist coming, but first, does this all make sense so far?
Daughter: Yes. But if the boss only works 4 hours and the workers work 8, does that mean the boss buys less stuff?
Dad: Ha, good catch, but no. Bosses usually pay themselves a much higher rate per hour, so they can afford to work less AND buy more.
Okay, quick recap: in an economy, most people work for wages. Like me. The university isn’t mine, someone else owns it.
Daughter: Does that person barely work, then?
Dad: Honestly, I’m not sure. I should ask around! But I’ve been exaggerating a little to make the point land. Plenty of owners work incredibly hard. Your Polish grandad, for instance. He owns a flower factory, and he works non-stop.
Daughter: But the owner isn’t usually the one who gets paid less than the workers.
Dad: True, and your grandad pays his workers well too. But sadly, plenty of factories in the world don’t. Sometimes someone has so much money, maybe inherited from rich parents, that they just buy a factory and collect the profits without lifting a finger. Permanently on holiday.
Daughter: That’s really bad.
Dad: It is, though again, I’m painting it in black and white to make it clear. People who work hard end up buying things made with fewer hours of work, while other people — often the richer factory owners — work less but still get things that took way more hours to make. That’s step one. Any questions about this?
Daughter: Maybe… but I don’t know how to ask it yet.
Dad: Maybe it’ll come to you later? Ok, onward to step two then. This same thing happens between whole countries, not just between people. The Netherlands is an economy. So is Bangladesh. Ethiopia. The United States.
Daughter: All the countries.
Dad: Right. Each country has its own economy — people making, buying, selling — but they’re all connected. The Netherlands buys clothes from Bangladesh, for example.
Daughter: And Bangladesh isn’t a rich country, so… that’s not fair.
Dad: Yes, but why do you think it’s not fair?
Daughter: Because the workers there have to work really hard for the bosses who own the factories?
Dad: Exactly. And they earn very little for it. Sometimes they work 11 or 12 hours a day, starting at 6am. So they can’t even go home most weeknights and sleep in dorms near the factory while their families live somewhere else. What they earn covers food, rent, maybe a bit sent home to their parents. No holidays.
Daughter: While their bosses go on holiday.
Dad: Yep. I actually met one, once. He owned a couple of factories like that. He’d strike deals with clothing shops in the Netherlands and sell to them dirt cheap. Which is exactly why we can buy cheap clothes now. They’re cheap because they were made in Bangladesh, by people working long hours for low pay.
Daughter: And the clothes have to travel all that way too. That’s bad.
Dad: That too! Now here’s the really tricky part. Even someone like me, who doesn’t own a factory, can end up buying things that took way more hours to make than the hours I worked for my salary. That’s what happens when we buy clothes from Bangladesh, flowers from Ethiopia, rice from India, cacao from Ghana — places where salaries are much lower than mine. Say someone there earns 1 euro a day, and I earn 100. That means in a single day, I earn enough to buy things that took 100 days of someone else’s work to make. A cacao farmer in Ghana could never do the reverse.
So I’m getting a lot more than I’m giving — even though that’s the last thing I want. Make sense?
Daughter: Yes.
Dad: So this is what I find so unfair about the world. First, within one country like the Netherlands, it’s already unfair between workers and bosses. But then it’s ALSO unfair between workers in different countries — Dutch workers versus Bangladeshi workers.
Daughter: And also the boss you met in Bangladesh, he gets more than the people working in his factories.
Dad: Right. I’d guess he is much richer than me, even.
Daughter: How come?
Dad: Because he owns factories and barely had to work.
Daughter: So he, and probably a lot of people, just don’t think about any of this?
Dad: That’s a great question! I think a lot of people find it totally normal. Maybe they think they deserve more, or that they’ve earned the right to work less, or that the world’s slowly getting fairer anyway.
Daughter: I think it’s getting more unfair, actually.
Dad: Yeah… I think you might be right. But you know, workers don’t just accept it quietly. They get fed up and go on strike sometimes.
Daughter: Because they’re not getting paid enough for everything they do.
Dad: Exactly, and it happens a lot. People reach their limit.
So that’s basically what the book’s about. One last piece: everything is made from people’s work and time — even the materials. Take a t-shirt: workers in Bangladesh sew it, but t-shirts need cotton first. Do you know where cotton comes from?
Daughter: A plant?
Dad: Right — and those plants don’t grow in Bangladesh, they grow in India. So the factory in Bangladesh actually has to buy cotton from India first, before it can even make the t-shirt.
Daughter: And the people growing cotton in India don’t earn much either.
Dad: Exactly! Cotton farmers work hard for very little. So you end up with cheap cotton, making cheap t-shirts, for people here in the Netherlands. And one more layer: you can also measure how much land or water went into growing that cotton. So it’s not only about human work, it’s also about how much of nature got used up along the way.
I hope that wasn’t too much all at once?
Daughter: Nope, I got it!
Dad: Great! Thank you for listening to your dad ramble about his book!
PS: for info about the book, see here.