How would one actually calculate the full “fruit of labor” in work that includes several people doing different tasks?
How to calculate between people doing the same task producing physical items seems easy. Add in customer service, sales, and development, and it seems easier to focus on what other groups pay for those skills, which is not what I want.
It also seems looking at the difference between having the role, and not. However some skills are mandatory, just less involved.
Feel free to simplify, but different tasks is a must.
Personally, I’d start at the minimum required to live in the immediate area around the job site and go up from there based on merit/difficulty of the task/importance of task. But then again, I’m not a business person.
and it seems easier to focus on what other groups pay for those skills, which is not what I want.
The problem is that the skills have different worth and that said worth is different given the skill set. This isn’t what you want to hear, but cost to replace is a good metric for this. This includes the quality of the work.
TL;DR Impossible, you can’t just split all the money among the employees.
If you want to be fair in this you need to include all the expenses any business has and also reduce that by some multiple, no business can spend all it makes and survive for long.
Businesses have the same risks and problems as people do, with ironically, additional problems and risks brought on by the people themselves, such as embezzlement and theft.
You have to include or calculate for holding back profits to stay in the bank to get the company through a recession, natural disasters, or unforeseen circumstances on the downside, or to buy new production facilities and equipment on the upside.
There is almost always debt service on real estate or existing equipment.
There are lots of costs any business has and must provide for such as defending against frivolous lawsuits, patent trolls, and grifters, as well as the usual ones such as advertising, complying with government regulations, taxes.
For retail and manufacturing, supplies and enough inventory takes up a lot of capital and also financing to make it work.
I’ve tried to say that employee wages aren’t anything close to what one sees on their paycheck. And been buried for it.
Unemployment insurance, worker’s comp insurance, taxes, benefits (even if minor), all adds up to roughly double one’s hourly rate.
Lemmy: “Fuck you! BILLIONAIRES!”
Fine smart ass. Go start and run a business. Be my guest.
This is such a non-argument. Of course a business needs to take care of its expenses to survive, and then some. The question is how to appropriately distribute the budget for worker’s pay.
No CEO can work 300x as hard as the other workers.
I think market based mechanisms for calculating pay would be very hard to get away from.
That said, Mondragon (worker cooperative) has a base pay rate and then all positions are assigned a multiplier to determine an individual’s compensation.
You are correct, some amount of market compensation will be necessary. If only for setting floors.
Mondragon looks interesting.
Something else they (and a lot of other coops) do is set a max ratio of executive income vs lowest paid worker income. So for example I think at Mondragon an executive can’t make more than six times the lowest paid worker.
At my company management pay is a fraction of the hourly cost of employees for standard time and materials work.
