Proposal: every product vendor must disclose the wages of the people who made it.

If you buy a box of chocolate, you get to know how much the people who picked the raw ingredients made, as well as the chocolatiers downstream from them, and so on.

If you buy an iPhone, you get to know how much the people who assembled it make, as well as the people who mined the lithium in the batteries, and the designers and engineers.

If you stream a song on Spotify, you get to know how much goes to the rights-holders. At the rights-holder end, you get to know how much goes to the performing artist, the songwriter, the engineers, the musicians, and so on.

If you buy a newspaper, you get to know how much the journalists, the printers, and the administrative staff make.

And so on and so on.

What if all wages were transparent?

Photo by Michael Chu, released under a CC license.