The Hierarchy of Labor Value: A Novel Merit-Based Perspective from Mines to Offices

The determination of labor value in the twenty-first century faces a critical dichotomy between market-clearing wages and the physiological and social reality of labor. The prevailing "Human Capital" paradigm, while effectively pricing scarcity and cognitive capacity, often fails to internalize the biological depreciation and social criticality of essential work. This study introduces the Onto-Epistemic Merit Model, a multi-dimensional valuation framework that reconstructs labor value through four axioms: Hardship  Knowledge (), Social Value and Responsibility Utilizing occupational descriptors from the O*NET database and safety statistics from the ILO, the research presents a comparative analysis between underground miners (high biological cost/basal value) and mechanical engineers (high cognitive cost/scalable value).

The findings reveal that while the global market valuation prizes the engineer approximately 2.6 times higher than the miner  the Onto-Epistemic model, which accounts for "Basal Value" and biological risk, yields a converged merit score These results challenge the linear scalability arguments of neoclassical economics (Taleb, 2007), suggesting that "non-scalable" infrastructural labor possesses an ontological priority over "scalable" superstructural labor. The study concludes by offering a theoretical basis for wage reforms in the age of automation, where the devaluation of cognitive labor may ironically re-center physical hardship as a primary determinant of value.