Since the start of our species, we have been living in groups that we call “societies”. Societies were communal and relatively small in numbers back in our prehistoric era. In today’s world, our societies are much different and dissimilar. However, the most important aspect of every society is the same, labour. It has the single most important source since the day humans began to roam our world.
In hunter-gatherer communes, humans didn’t have many sources that they used for thriving. They had some weapons and tools but their main source of survival was their labour. The labour they used for protecting themselves, spreading their culture and gathering their necessities. With the agricultural revolution, human society was drastically changed however labour did’ lose its value. Instead, the ways that the labour was used changed. It was now used for planting and harvesting agricultural goods and grazing the staple animals.
Labor is also a very important way of calculating the value of commodities. Like Karl Marx stated on his book Das Kapital “Commodity, above all, is an object outside of us and, with its inherent qualities, is something that meets one or another type of human need. The nature of these needs whether they arise from the stomach or from the imagination makes no difference.“, commodities can always change and the thing we can use for calculating the value of a commodity is the quality and quantity of labour that was used for producing it. The quantity or quality of labour necessary to produce something can also change. Like in the industrial revolution, a British worker could produce the same amount of textile by using half of the time necessary to produce the same amount of textile in somewhere else. In this scenario, the value of the textile produced is also halved because of the labour needed for it. So, we can understand that labour is not just important for societies, it is necessary.
A society can’t live without labour and labourers; it can change the way it uses the labour for but it can never change the necessity of labour. For these reasons, a society and its governors should not fight with labour or the things related with it. Instead, they should co-operate with labour and consider it maybe not the most but one of the most important parts of the society. Organisations like ILO, Human Rights Watch and ITUC should be empowered or re-structured so that the protection of labour is guaranteed. Not only the global ones I just stated should be used for this cause, local syndicates and organisations should also help the co-operation of society and labour.