When I try to think of a situation where workers sell their labor power for an exchange of necessities, I think about the paid work that teaching assistants do at universities. The teaching assistants are graduate students that work for the university in exchange for compensation and for a way to help them finish their graduate degree. Our own university has teaching assistants that either work under the professors in specific classes or the teaching assistants actually teach a course. Their labor is working under a professor, whether it is grading student's papers or exams, giving guidance to students and helping make sure the course is running smoothly. Some teaching assistants labor work is actually teaching the class, doing the job of the professors. They are in charge of facilitating the course work of the semester. To us students, their labor stops at the end of class. However, their labor does not stop once we leave the classroom. They have to continue working outside of class to finish their degree, doing all this without a salary equal to that of professors. The university uses graduate students as teaching assistants to help facilitate class course work while at the same time having them do the job of a professor for less pay, therefore the school gains surplus value.
The money the university gets is through tuition of the students, government help and as well as donations from people. This payment is for an exchange of work the university's faculty produces. Students pay to have an education and universities have workers produce course work for this exchange. Rather than paying the professors, some tenured, a higher salary, the university uses graduate students to run the course and finish their degree while paying them a lesser amount. According to The American Enterprise Institute, “evidence that institutions are using a disproportionate share of these revenues for institutional and administrative costs rather than for instructional ones.” To me, the Capitalists are the administrators, such as the CEO, Dean or chiefs of staff, that get a higher pay. They are the ones that would be benefiting from school costs. While I am not saying that the university is using graduate students in an insidious fashion, the teaching assistants are at a disadvantage when it comes to their wages. The average salary a teaching assistant makes if they work close to 43 hours a week, 5 days a week would be 31,130.00 for a 9 month contract (UIC 2013). However, the hours they are calculating can not include the hours they spend on their own research work or time spent on their students.
Marx describes life-activity as a manifestation of his own life. When the worker practices his labor power, it is part of his or her life-activity that he is selling to another person to have a sense of security or as Marx says, subsistence. Therefore, their life-activity is now not just a way to survive but they are now sacrificing their own life for a reason for existence. We can not just calculate the work the teaching assistants do in just the classroom but outside too. Last year the graduate students held a strike for better compensation and other reasons. They do acknowledge the fact that while they work an enormous amount of time at the school, they do not get paid a reasonable amount of money to compensate for their living expenses.
While I do not know the outcome of the strike, whether the teaching assistants now get paid more, I as a student was impacted by this situation. In a capitalist society, the owners gain profit from a commodity that is exchanged but they are the only ones that benefit from it. Teaching assistants do earn money and gain experience to work and finish up their degrees but most of that financial earning is used to compensate for the work they put into their jobs and their means to survive. They go on to graduate after and the university just acquires more graduate students to continue the job. So, in the end, the university still stretches it's power over new workers and continues the cycle. Marx points out that once capital grows, wage labor grows and the domination of the capitalist extends over more people. He also states that competition between workers grows as well. Graduate students work hard at their jobs to secure a position in a university for their future even if the earnings they get is not all that fulfilling.
Schneider, Mark. 2009.”Where Does All That Tuition Go?”. American Enterprise Institute, December 18th, 2009. Retrieved January 23rd, 2014 (http://www.aei.org/article/education/higher-education/where-does-all-that-tuition-go/)
University of Illinois at Chicago Human Resources. 2013. Retrieved January 23rd, 2014. (http://www.hr.uic.edu/classification_and_compensation/minima_for_graduate_appointments/).