Wealth,Exploitation and Labor Discipline in the Contemporary Capitalist Economy

This paper synthesizes in a Leontief economic model the arguments of exploitation and unequal distribution of wealth put forward by Roemer (1982, 1986) and of the power relationship between employers and employees with regard to the performance of labor presented by Bowles and Gintis (1988, 1990). The author introduces the level of the agent’s labor-discipline as measured by the ratio of labor effort per unit of labor time to the real wage rate. The connection bet ween this kind of power index and both exploitation status and wealth distribution is then examined. The result obtained is that, under some reasonable assumptions, the exploitation status and the level of labor-discipline accurately reflect the unequal distribution of wealth.