One of the things that has struck me the most so far in my travels in and around South Africa is that the prices for many things are so cheap. Currently, for example, the sun is breaking over Mossei Bay as I am sitting in my hotel suite with my mother and stepfather, waiting for the restaurant to open for breakfast, and this fine suite cost us, apart from our deposit, some $250 each between my mother/stepfather on one side and myself on the other. When we go downstairs to the restaurant, and eat a meal other than breakfast (included), the prices range from $3.50 for a massive slice of dessert, to $5.00 or $6.00 for a sizable pizza or fish & chips or chicken strips, to $10 for a reasonable sizable 10 ounce steak from the area’s lean angus cattle. It almost feels like robbery to buy things here, given that in many cases the labor component of those prices is so low.

When I arrived in the airport, the only place I found to charge my laptop so that I could catch up on some writing was the area at the info desk. This area was staffed by people who often found themselves pushing wheelchairs or answering questions for people like myself (where are the electric plugs?) who worked 12-hour shifts from either 6AM to 6PM or 6PM to 6AM, in at least three day rotations, and from what was explained to me, their wages were not high enough for them to be able to afford to drive. I could well believe it. These people openly fantasized about moving to the United States or Europe where they could find jobs that paid them enough to be able to live decently. This is a common refrain from what I have heard, and it is a natural consequence of wages being low. To be sure, the thrifty shopper in me appreciates it when goods and services are extremely cheap, but when that comes from the labor component being so minimal that people who work long hours receive terrible wages and have awful living conditions, this feels more troublesome. Being just to the one who labors does sometimes mean paying a bit more for what one buys, but to the extent that one can know that it goes to help people to live decently, it is well-worth paying so.

If workers in South Africa and neighboring countries appear to be getting the short end of the stick, there has been no such restraint when it comes to the demands of workers in countries like the United States for increased wages. While the three sources of wealth are labor, rents, and capital, it appears that companies themselves who are responsible for paying out wages have a certain level for labor costs that they like to maintain, and if labor costs get above that threshold, they seek to spend capital to avoid increasing or even keeping at that labor level. Whether that means getting more machines like self-pay checkouts at fast food restaurants or grocery stores or AI for the usual badly written Hollywood television shows or movies we can expect in the future, or robots to build cars instead of overpriced and entitled auto workers who strike on a whim, if labor is able to divert too much of the price of a given good or service to itself, the repercussions lead to a reduction of the share of such labor and a lower amount of jobs available in those sectors where labor is most expensive. Ideally, the situation of workers would be the highest possible level where it did not prompt managers and owners to divert more money into capital investments to reduce the amount of workers, or the best sustainable income that one could attain at the highest possible amount of workers, so as to share the good times with as many people as possible among the population that was interested in working.

At least in South Africa and Swaziland, I have not found people unwilling to work. Those underpaid workers who push around the wheelchairs of people like my mother and stepfather are quick to dash around to grab an extra wheelchair if the count has been reported to them incorrectly. The people in Swaziland who washed our rental car after its experience on the terrible Bulembo road near Biggs Peak did an amazing job and were well worth the price and tip that we gave them. The same has been true of the enthusiastic labor that I have seen here within the hotel as well as among the taxi drivers we encountered at George Airport. The sort of normal tipping habits that we have in the range of a bit more than the 15% VAT, which strike us as nothing particularly generous, but rather the norm, are seen as very generous by those in South Africa who are probably used to being tipped at about a 10% level. How much is one willing to pay in order to act in a way that one sees as being just to the claims of those who labor?