1. Labor, conceived as the exertion of human energy is a necessary means for economic exchanges and transfers.
²This indispensable means, however, is never itself a commodity, for the simple reason that it is a product—a result—of an expenditure of energy and time which is exchanged for money or directly for another result—another product of an expenditure of human energy.
2. The distinction between labor as an expenditure of human energy and labor as an exchangeable commodity is not specious.
The fact is that there are two realities here, certainly linked but nevertheless distinct. Let's consider an example. A very large wedding cake was ordered from a pastry chef. The latter begins manufacturing the evening before the day of delivery. He spends the whole night there, in the basement, because that's where his laboratory is located. In the morning, the customer who placed this order arrives at the store. The pastry chef's wife warns her husband from the top of the stairs. The pastry chef, who had just dozed off, woke up with a start and began to bring the product of his work to the shop. Badly awakened and too tired from his night's work, he misses a step, the wedding cake rolls down the stairs, the dog attracted by the windfall immediately gobbles up a large slice of the cake, in any case smashed by his fall and riddled with porcelain debris. As a result, there has indeed been an expenditure of human energy but there is no longer any product of this expenditure in exchange for its payment by the customer.
3. The terms "price of labor" and "cost of labor" mean nothing when it comes to labor as an expenditure of human energy.
They only take on a meaning when it comes to labor as product of labor provided in exchange for a wage. This is done for the most eminently practical as well as theoretical purposes.
4. Often, the wage does not only include what is paid directly to the employee.
In this case, there is also what is paid by the employer on behalf of the employee as such. Of this part, it can be said, in distinction from the share directly paid to the employee, that it is indirect. The entire wage is then the sum of its direct and indirect shares.
5. One way to get comfortable with one of the most basic economic realities is to talk about the "cost of labor" as if it could be anything other than the entire wage.
A brake on more objectivity in economic relations qualified as social is thus kept tight, and all the more firmly because the relative shares of indirect wages are large in relation to the direct wage and the complete wage. This is a very important point. Major economic policy proposals must hold it back as long as the fiction of the employers' reputed shares of the entire wage remains.