In reply to Jim.

Jim,

I write to you as someone who has spent considerable time working with a women’s weaving association in Guatemala…

You would not base a labor hours pricing scheme off of the slow, lazy worker. That would be stupid.

You would survey a number of women to find out approximately long it takes to make a morral of certain size and design. There will be women who are very talented and make the product quickly. It would be unfair to base the mano de obra on their work speed. Instead you want to find an average of how long it takes a good weaver to make the given product without any errors.

You also need to decide what is a reasonable and fair target daily income for the women. We used 35Q as our target daily income meaning that a weaver of average speed working 8 hours a day could earn for herself at least 35Q a day. Although this might seem low, it is much more than an uneducated indigenous woman could earn otherwise and is more than their husbands can earn from a full day working in the fields.

From there using 35Q as a target daily income, you get 4.38 Quetzales as the hourly wage. Let’s say from your survey of the women, you came to the conclusion that the aforementioned morral should take 5 hours to make. So a woman gets 22Q for making the bag. It may take the slow lazy worker 10 hours to make it, but she still gets 22Q.

And I tell you design intricacy DOES have a big impact on price. You may be unaware of it, but different designs require different skill levels and time to make. If your weavers were savvy businesswomen they would all start making single color morrales at the 9 x 9 size because they would have the maximum payout for the minimal effort. You are paying them solely for the size of the bag and not the intricacy of the design, so why would they put forth more effort to make a design that takes more time and is harder?

Concrete example:

My association had 8 different designs of table runners. Every table runner measured 30 cm x 180 cm and yet the mano de obra paid for these runners ranged from Q60 to Q195. It takes a woman nearly 4 days longer to make a Mishcan design runner as opposed to a simple one. Why would a woman ever make the Mishcan design or the 6 other designs when she is only going to get paid 60Q? You have to reward the extra work or there is no incentive to do it. And the extra work comes from not just making a product bigger but also from the intricacy of the design.

I do think Ford and Carnegie would approve.