The Oakland Construction Site: A Lesson in Capital and Labor

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
8-13-26

 

I was walking in downtown Oakland a while back, and as I walked past a large construction site, an image jumped right out at me. It wasn’t the scale of the building or the heavy machinery, but a simple piece of makeshift plywood. Painted right in the center, in rough, urgent spray-paint, were the words: "Pick up the Pace!"

 

It caught my eye because, instantly, I saw how that phrase encapsulates my own life existence and that of millions of working people throughout the world. It hits home for me.

 

What it does is express a fundamental social relation: the dynamic between the buyer of labor power (the employer or capitalist) and the seller of that labor (the worker). The price of that worker’s labor power is what we call wages. Most of us survive, raise families, and navigate our lives off the wages we receive during our lifetime. If we’re lucky, we can save some of it and even invest it, earning a little extra without working—a welcome boost, but rarely something we can rely on. In the era of capitalist decline, and over many decades here in the US, it often takes working three jobs and many hours simply to survive.

 

This relationship is the entire basis of the capitalist system of production and the ultimate source of wealth in society.

 

The workers on this Oakland building site receive a paycheck. They may work 10 or 8 hours a day for it. If these workers are union members, they will likely have better conditions and possibly higher wages. If not, their overall package—vacations, sick leave, and healthcare—is often inadequate or non existent.

 

Meanwhile, the owner of capital—the investors and companies funding this construction project—expects a return on their investment. They get this by paying the workers less in wages than the total value the workers create during the day.That gap, that unpaid surplus value, is where profit is born.

 

If the return on that investment falls below expectations, the employer has two primary choices. One is to lengthen the time the worker is on the job. The other is to force the worker to speed up, to move faster—literally, to "pick up the pace," as that spray-painted sign demanded.

 

This second option is often preferable to capital. Over the past century or more, workers have banded together and built unions to pressure employers, limiting the hours of work in a day or week and forcing employers to pay extra—overtime—if those limits are crossed.

 

The raw demand to simply "pick up the pace" becomes a clearer visualization of how capital extracts its surplus and what the source of their profits is, the unpaid labor of the working class.