Pay transparency laws have made more employers disclose salary ranges in job listings. Yet, a new report finds advertised wages aren’t growing as expected.
That’s pretty difficult for a lot of jobs. For someone in sales, easy, you can look at the value of the contracts they bring in. For someone who works in facilities maintenance or tech support? Good luck figuring that out.
For someone in sales, easy, you can look at the value of the contracts they bring in.
I would argue against this. As someone whose sales guys overpromise just to get the contract signed, in order to see how much they actually bring in I would subtract the number of overtime hours/additional effort we need to invest compared to their initial sales pitch. Or, you promised feature X is delivered in the first 2 years? Well when the customer doesn’t get it and complains about it, that’s going to be subtracted from your next signing bonus.
Listen, I know the job is made so that they bring in the most contracts possible and then the techs need to figure out the rest. But if the company constantly gets in trouble with the same few big-name customers in the industry (making them not want to sign with us in the future because of unrealistic promises), maybe it’s time to consider that Sales’ approach is sometimes detrimental?
The issue there is not everyone is equally productive. In the most direct example someone who is more experienced with a piece of equipment or technology will often be more productive with it than someone who isn’t. That’s ignoring that different people have different competencies. If you ask me to design costumes for a TV show, I would fail miserably. If you asked a fashion designer to do my job without any training, they would likewise not be very successful at it.
There are plenty of ills that come along with capitalism, but I do think some amount of incentive will promote productivity. I don’t think that people are lazy and won’t do any work unless they are threatened with homelessness and starvation, but I do believe if an innovative strong performer in a role is not given recognition in a real tangible way, they will either leave to a place where they can get that recognition or just stop being as innovative and productive.
Productivity is a form of activity, not a quantity.
Systems of productivity that are organized by wage remuneration rely on processes of labor valorization, but no such process reflects any inherent or essential feature of the productive activities undertaken by any individual worker.
Production in enterprise is by social processes.
Processes of valorization have more cogency at the level of the entire enterprise, because products within the enterprise are created through the complex accumulation of many individual contributions, but are exchanged between easily separable entities, one enterprise with another, or an enterprise with a consumer, often through commodity markets.
Ultimately, there is no law of nature for resolving a distinctively quantified value of each worker’s labor.
Similarly, there is no law of nature proscribing the same rate of remuneration to each worker per unit of time contributed to the social processes of labor. A social choice for such practices would be possible to implement.
Except productivity isn’t a factor purely of activity. You can spend hours trying to fix something if build something and fail, because sometimes things are hard.
I think you should obviously be paid for your time as an employee, but if I hire a plumber, they spend 4 hours trying to fix a sink and it never gets fixed, I’m not hiring that plumber again.
No one’s saying you should valorize people at the top, I was just pointing out that directly quantifying value of an individual contributor who is far removed from the actual thing being sold can be really hard, if not impossible so paying someone proportionate to the direct value they create is not practical.
Of course there’s no law of nature preventing you from paying everyone exactly the same wage, companies are not some kind of fundamental unit of organization subject to physical laws. No one is arguing this, I’m just saying paying everyone the exact same thing means not just paying less productive people more, but also paying more productive people less.
Excessively verbose prose obfuscates the intent behind a post and hinders clear communication between parties undergoing a discussion as opposed to economical use of floral vocabulary which engenders a clarity of thought and facilitates a clearer flow of information allow both parties to more easily converge to an amenable conclusion.
Not sure if you’re quoting someone, but if you are it’s not actually very effective at communicating a point, especially when it’s only tangentially related to what we’re talking about. If you do find someone else has made a good point regarding a conversation you’re in, it’s more effective to paraphrase it and highlight key points that support your argument. Honestly, the quotes you picked out don’t really pertain to what we’re talking about. It’s ultimately not about what what is the best way to organize an economy, but whether or not you can directly quantify the productivity of an individual and what the effects of simply paying everyone the exact same amount regardless of productivity.
Again, valorization of workers’ labor depends on a process being chosen for labor valorization, and any process chosen to valorize workers’ labor is simply a process chosen.
No choice is objectivity more accurate than all others, respecting actual value of labor.
Equal rate of remuneration, for each unit of time, for every worker, is not choosing a rate different from the value of each worker’s labor, but rather choosing that each worker’s labor has equal value.
Your premise is that some worker’s labor is more valuable than others’, as an inherent or essential attribute of the activity representing the labor.
The premise is false.
Every activity of labor may be objectively described, but such a description encloses the entirety of its objective attributes.
Value is not an objective attribute.
Your objection about the plumber is a red herring.
Activities that are not productive are not relevant to a discussion over how various activities of labor are valorized, because labor is simply productive activity.
Further, the enterprise manages which task occupies each worker at each time. As long as each worker cooperates with such decisions, the worker is being productive within the enterprise, by cooperatively contributing to the social processes of production managed within the enterprise.
Your conception of some workers being more or less removed from a product is simply a subjective feeling, irrelevant to the value of the worker’s labor provided to the social processes of production within the enterprise.
Bruh, the comment was about being paid commensurate to the value they created and my point was that’s a very hard number to quantify for people far removed from revenue, not that they don’t provide value.
The full value of labor can be considered meaningfully only at the level of the whole enterprise.
You and your coworkers collectively contribute labor worth the value of the products you create collectively, minus the costs of inputs and operation.
How such value is distributed within the enterprise is simply a choice by those who control the enterprise. No objective solution is available. Owners pay each worker the minimum possible for the labor to be provided, which under current systems is different for each kind of labor, due to labor commodification over markets represented the law of supply and demand,.
That’s actually rather easy if you work for a publicly traded corp, at least to ballpark it.
Company profits / total workers. (<-this seems facile, what am I missing?)
OTOH, beware comparisons of pay scales.
“CEOs make too much!”
Do the math. CEO pay is typically 1/100th of a penny earned, sometimes 1/1000th, not a drop in the bucket. Don’t matter. When I was a kid, sports star pay was the thing to rage about. LOL, haven’t seen a single lemming comment about that. Whatever.
“I don’t make enough!”
And that’s very likely true, but you cost far more than you think. Good rule of thumb? Double your pay, that’s what you actually cost. You make $15/hr.? Company probably pays $30, or a bit more. Company has to pay worker’s comp insurance, taxes, benefits, unemployment insurance, payroll processing fees, all that and more.
SOURCE: Worked IT for a payroll company, got the inside scoop.
The real number I’d like to know is how much value my labor is actually producing versus what they pay me.
That would be some fun transparency. You could compare ratios and that ratio would be a number people talk about.
That’s pretty difficult for a lot of jobs. For someone in sales, easy, you can look at the value of the contracts they bring in. For someone who works in facilities maintenance or tech support? Good luck figuring that out.
I would argue against this. As someone whose sales guys overpromise just to get the contract signed, in order to see how much they actually bring in I would subtract the number of overtime hours/additional effort we need to invest compared to their initial sales pitch. Or, you promised feature X is delivered in the first 2 years? Well when the customer doesn’t get it and complains about it, that’s going to be subtracted from your next signing bonus.
Listen, I know the job is made so that they bring in the most contracts possible and then the techs need to figure out the rest. But if the company constantly gets in trouble with the same few big-name customers in the industry (making them not want to sign with us in the future because of unrealistic promises), maybe it’s time to consider that Sales’ approach is sometimes detrimental?
Businessmen, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line
Know what any of it is worth
Profit/number of employees…
The issue there is not everyone is equally productive. In the most direct example someone who is more experienced with a piece of equipment or technology will often be more productive with it than someone who isn’t. That’s ignoring that different people have different competencies. If you ask me to design costumes for a TV show, I would fail miserably. If you asked a fashion designer to do my job without any training, they would likewise not be very successful at it.
There are plenty of ills that come along with capitalism, but I do think some amount of incentive will promote productivity. I don’t think that people are lazy and won’t do any work unless they are threatened with homelessness and starvation, but I do believe if an innovative strong performer in a role is not given recognition in a real tangible way, they will either leave to a place where they can get that recognition or just stop being as innovative and productive.
Productivity is a form of activity, not a quantity.
Systems of productivity that are organized by wage remuneration rely on processes of labor valorization, but no such process reflects any inherent or essential feature of the productive activities undertaken by any individual worker.
Production in enterprise is by social processes.
Processes of valorization have more cogency at the level of the entire enterprise, because products within the enterprise are created through the complex accumulation of many individual contributions, but are exchanged between easily separable entities, one enterprise with another, or an enterprise with a consumer, often through commodity markets.
Ultimately, there is no law of nature for resolving a distinctively quantified value of each worker’s labor.
Similarly, there is no law of nature proscribing the same rate of remuneration to each worker per unit of time contributed to the social processes of labor. A social choice for such practices would be possible to implement.
Except productivity isn’t a factor purely of activity. You can spend hours trying to fix something if build something and fail, because sometimes things are hard.
I think you should obviously be paid for your time as an employee, but if I hire a plumber, they spend 4 hours trying to fix a sink and it never gets fixed, I’m not hiring that plumber again.
No one’s saying you should valorize people at the top, I was just pointing out that directly quantifying value of an individual contributor who is far removed from the actual thing being sold can be really hard, if not impossible so paying someone proportionate to the direct value they create is not practical.
Of course there’s no law of nature preventing you from paying everyone exactly the same wage, companies are not some kind of fundamental unit of organization subject to physical laws. No one is arguing this, I’m just saying paying everyone the exact same thing means not just paying less productive people more, but also paying more productive people less.
Excessively verbose prose obfuscates the intent behind a post and hinders clear communication between parties undergoing a discussion as opposed to economical use of floral vocabulary which engenders a clarity of thought and facilitates a clearer flow of information allow both parties to more easily converge to an amenable conclusion.
Not sure if you’re quoting someone, but if you are it’s not actually very effective at communicating a point, especially when it’s only tangentially related to what we’re talking about. If you do find someone else has made a good point regarding a conversation you’re in, it’s more effective to paraphrase it and highlight key points that support your argument. Honestly, the quotes you picked out don’t really pertain to what we’re talking about. It’s ultimately not about what what is the best way to organize an economy, but whether or not you can directly quantify the productivity of an individual and what the effects of simply paying everyone the exact same amount regardless of productivity.
Again, valorization of workers’ labor depends on a process being chosen for labor valorization, and any process chosen to valorize workers’ labor is simply a process chosen.
No choice is objectivity more accurate than all others, respecting actual value of labor.
Equal rate of remuneration, for each unit of time, for every worker, is not choosing a rate different from the value of each worker’s labor, but rather choosing that each worker’s labor has equal value.
Your premise is that some worker’s labor is more valuable than others’, as an inherent or essential attribute of the activity representing the labor.
The premise is false.
Every activity of labor may be objectively described, but such a description encloses the entirety of its objective attributes.
Value is not an objective attribute.
Your objection about the plumber is a red herring.
Activities that are not productive are not relevant to a discussion over how various activities of labor are valorized, because labor is simply productive activity.
Further, the enterprise manages which task occupies each worker at each time. As long as each worker cooperates with such decisions, the worker is being productive within the enterprise, by cooperatively contributing to the social processes of production managed within the enterprise.
Your conception of some workers being more or less removed from a product is simply a subjective feeling, irrelevant to the value of the worker’s labor provided to the social processes of production within the enterprise.
Bruh, the comment was about being paid commensurate to the value they created and my point was that’s a very hard number to quantify for people far removed from revenue, not that they don’t provide value.
The value you describe does not exist.
It is not “hard to quantity”. It is completely imaginary.
I addressed your concerns, now two times in succession.
Production is social, not individual.
Products, which are collectively created, may have a particular value.
How each individual worker’s contribution is valorized is a choice among the group that created the product collectively.
They do hold that data of course, where possible. I’ve heard it called personal P&L.
But tbh I reckon it would only be a new source of depression to know. :p
The national average is $128,502 in 2017 dollars, $160k+ today. That’s well over 3 times the median wage of $45k.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_person_employed
The full value of labor can be considered meaningfully only at the level of the whole enterprise.
You and your coworkers collectively contribute labor worth the value of the products you create collectively, minus the costs of inputs and operation.
How such value is distributed within the enterprise is simply a choice by those who control the enterprise. No objective solution is available. Owners pay each worker the minimum possible for the labor to be provided, which under current systems is different for each kind of labor, due to labor commodification over markets represented the law of supply and demand,.
That’s actually rather easy if you work for a publicly traded corp, at least to ballpark it.
Company profits / total workers. (<-this seems facile, what am I missing?)
OTOH, beware comparisons of pay scales.
“CEOs make too much!”
Do the math. CEO pay is typically 1/100th of a penny earned, sometimes 1/1000th, not a drop in the bucket. Don’t matter. When I was a kid, sports star pay was the thing to rage about. LOL, haven’t seen a single lemming comment about that. Whatever.
“I don’t make enough!”
And that’s very likely true, but you cost far more than you think. Good rule of thumb? Double your pay, that’s what you actually cost. You make $15/hr.? Company probably pays $30, or a bit more. Company has to pay worker’s comp insurance, taxes, benefits, unemployment insurance, payroll processing fees, all that and more.
SOURCE: Worked IT for a payroll company, got the inside scoop.
When companies pay peanuts compared to the C-Suite AND post record profits each year, I think the company could give me more than a 3% raise.
Well, that goes without saying. I was commenting on the idea of “fair market value”.
The downvotes say otherwise.
It’s impressive how deftly you avoid the comment to spout your own opinion
deleted by creator
If you have to underpay your workers to make enough profit, then your business model sucks, and your company should fail.
Economics 1B