Labor and Services

Labor is direct input of human work always accounted for as being a foreground input. Direct labor is accounted for as working hours or years applied and the quality of the worker (unskilled, trained, educated, etc) using Unit Emergy Values for labor based on level of training and education (seJ/person/time). In practice, however, the emergy value of direct labor is computed through the money payments for labor since calculating the emergy required to support different levels of education and training has not been done for most economies of the world. Therefore the money payments for labor are multiplied by an emergy cost factor, the Unit Emergy Value of currency (seJ/GDP) in a given year in a given economy. Services are considered indirect labor, accounted for as background inputs, and due to the multiplicity of process steps in which labor was applied in the background, it is hardly accountable as hours or years, and therefore is accounted for based on money payments as reflected in price of inputs, multiplied by the emergy cost factor, the Unit Emergy Value of currency (seJ/GDP) in a given year in a given economy. The additional work provided by human activities in order to refine a raw resource adds to its quality by making it more suitable to the final user. It is therefore clear that what makes a resource valuable is both the environmental and human work investment, according to the emergy donor-side perspective. Labor carries the memory of fuels, materials, food, minerals needed directly and indirectly to support the life of workers, train, transport and feed them. In a like manner, services carry a share of the total emergy supporting the societal infrastructures (health system, transport, defense, education, communications, governmental structures and so on), all needed for direct and indirect labor to fully display its potential. Labor and service inputs to a process also transfer vital knowledge and information possessed by the laborer, to the production process. The problem is that the information content of that input is very difficult if not impossible to quantify as such. Instead, the amount of resources supporting the generation of information, i.e. how much it takes to support educated labor, generate innovation, make new technologies, construct infrastructures, test and spread new solutions and designs, can be quantified in emergy terms. This is why it is important to account for labor and services in Emergy and LCA, not to risk that important and much needed contributions are disregarded and the final results affected to a larger extent. From the above considerations, accounting for labor and services adds additional important information about the structure, infrastructures and socio-economic development of a society in which a process takes place and how it affects the performance and the cost of the process under investigation. We discuss in this paper some general accounting procedures and numerical examples for inclusion of labor and services in emergy evaluations as well as for future inclusion of L&S in combined emergy/LCA framework. LABOR AND ADDED VALUE The traditional way of measuring economic transactions and activities uses money as a unit of account. As a consequence, resources and money are strictly related to the working time of humans in resource processing and consuming. An emergy evaluation of a production process is therefore an assessment of the links between resources available, labor displayed, and product generated.