09/04/2026
When people argue against raising the minimum wage, someone invariably says:
“But what if the work isn’t worth that much?”
Worth according to whom?
A wage is not a magical measure of the real-world value of the work performed.
If someone earns $12 an hour, that does not mean their work produces exactly $12 an hour in value.
It means that under the current set of laws, customs, labor-market conditions, employer practices and bargaining power, somebody is willing and able to hire them for $12.
Those are two completely different things.
Think about:
Childcare workers.
Home health aides.
Hotel housekeepers.
Farmworkers.
Nursing assistants.
Restaurant workers.
We depend on their work, sometimes desperately.
Their low wages don’t prove that their work has little value.
Their wages tell us something about the system in which those wages were negotiated — often with very unequal bargaining power.
The unpaid labor of mothers and other caregivers makes this point clearly.
A mother may spend hours feeding, bathing, teaching, comforting, transporting, scheduling, cleaning, monitoring, advocating, nursing, planning and keeping another human being alive.
(This is an example; fathers and other people perform this work too.)
The mother’s wage for that work is $0.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean the work has zero value.
Hire other people to perform pieces of exactly that work and suddenly each piece acquires a market price: childcare, tutoring, housekeeping, cooking, transportation, eldercare, nursing assistance, household management.
Yet even then, many of those occupations are poorly paid—not because the work is unimportant, but because importance and compensation are entirely different things.
And look how these low-paid or unpaid yet critical positions fit into the system we live under:
Unpaid caregiver: $0
Paid childcare/home-care worker: low wage
Person managing a company that employs childcare/home-care workers: much higher wage
Investor who owns part of that company: potentially vastly more income
You cannot look at that ladder and reasonably conclude that it measures the amount of value each person contributes to human life.
It measures something else.
It reflects ownership, bargaining power, scarcity, credentials, social status, regulation, access to capital, cultural assumptions about whose work “counts,” and—crucially—who gets to participate in setting the price.
There’s also an incredible linguistic trick hiding here. We call one activity “work” when someone pays for it and often cease to regard essentially the same activity as work when nobody does.
A woman can spend ten hours caring for three children and she’s “home with the kids.”
Pay her to spend ten hours caring for somebody else’s three children and she has a job.
We have gotten so accustomed to the way work is organized that we mistake its outcomes for natural laws.
They aren’t natural laws. 
We designed this system.
We can design it differently.
