Compensation and Measurement
Wage is a basic compensation for paid labour, and the compensation for labour per period of time is referred to as the wage rate. Other frequently used terms include:
- wage = payment per unit of time (typically an hour)
- earnings = payment accrued over a period (typically a week, a month, or a year)
- total compensation = earnings + other benefits for labour
- income = total compensation + unearned income
- economic rent = total compensation - opportunity cost
Economists measure labour in terms of hours worked, total wages, or efficiency.
- total cost = fixed cost + variable cost
Read more about this topic: Labor Economics
Famous quotes containing the words compensation and, compensation and/or measurement:
“I do not want to be covetous, but I think I speak the minds of many a wife and mother when I say I would willingly work as hard as possible all day and all night, if I might be sure of a small profit, but have worked hard for twenty-five years and have never known what it was to receive a financial compensation and to have what was really my own.”
—Emma Watrous, U.S. inventor. As quoted in Feminine Ingenuity, ch. 8, by Anne L. MacDonald (1992)
“Many old people receive pensions for no other reason, it seems to me, but as a compensation for having lived a long time ago.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“That’s the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)