this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
593 points (98.4% liked)
Work Reform
10028 readers
235 users here now
A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
Literally not the point I was making. If your objective is to incentivize employees to be productive and achieve some kind of monetary objective which, because of the default state of even the most populist of countries, most people need to maintain their desired standard of living, then you should pay people different amounts of money based on how well they support those objectives (and practically to overcome market forces based on how many people are willing to provide those skills you need).
yes, some people based on some combination of experience and acuity are able to churn out 10 widgets and hour instead of 5. If you are an employer that profits from selling widgets and needs to pay people to make them, and you prefer people make an effort to increase this thing that you want them to do, you should incentivise that behavior in some way. I'm not saying you should exploit people, there is some minimum amount of compensation that allows people to survive with a reasonable minimum standard of living based on the prevailing societal norms of where you live. Anthing less is not humane.
The amount of money you pay people and the amount of money your customers pay you is a very objective and generally accepted definition of value. Coincidentally, it's also the definition of value that the original premise is using
They're talking about their pay, which is a concrete number, and comparing it to the value they are producing which, based on context clues, heavily implies they are talking about monetary value. You can't really pay someone commensurate to the emotional or utilitarian value they produce without first converting it into something monetary.
It was a bit hyperbolic, but you could easily say a plumber that makes a fix that breaks in a week provides some amount of value, you get running water for a week where you would otherwise not. No matter how you wish to quantify monetary value, that is clearly worth less than a plumber who will fix you faucet so it runs for 10 years.
No, my whole point originally is its based on how difficult it is to quantify the monetary value (the kind the original question was about) for some roles compared to others. Literally no one would say that the IT professional that ensures that sales people are able to send out emails and track sales isn't not essential to the objective of creating monetary value by selling something to someone, but at the same time without a sales person going out and convincing people to buy a product you're not going to get a lot of sales either. So who is ultimately responsible for the sale? Both. What fraction is due to the IT professional and what fraction is due to the sales person who does a good job understanding the customer's needs and making a convincing argument for why you should buy the widget? That question is very difficult. Most jobs instead are built around "how do I maximize my personal profit" which is usually what people who run companies care about which brings us back to the original concern that companies will try to pay you the very least amount they are able to while still incentivizing you to do the job well enough that you provide as much net positive value to them while minimizing how much they pay you.
As far as workers being more or less removed from the product, the reason it feels easier to apply this value to a sales person is because they can clearly show they made X sales calls and garnered $Y worth of revenue or net profit to the company. So, if you really wanted to figure out the direct monetary value of the earnings brought to the company by the IT professional, you would essentially need to work out how much of the pie that the sales person brought in was due to the IT pro supporting their needs and then do this for every other role that they IT professional helps and connect those roles back to the ultimate amount of profit they generate for the company (aka value in the context of this discussion).
If you are going to pay people in something with monetary value, which most people living in most extant economic systems that have been implemented to any non-trivial degree, then you need to somehow come up with a number for what to pay this person if you want them to show up to work and perform the function you intend of them.
Final note,
You can't just declare a definition of a word to be something completely removed from the way it is used relating to the topic being discussed then act like a point you make relating to this other definition you are choosing to use is somehow valid in the context of the original discussion.
Again, an enterprise is not an organization in which each worker creates some quantity of final product.
An enterprise is an organization in which all workers contribute to the social processes of production to create collectively its final products.
How the value of the products, determined at the point of sale, is distributed among the various individuals, who are associated with the enterprise, is a choice made by whoever controls the enterprise.
Different choices are preferred by different parties. Business owners pay workers the minimum possible for the labor to be provided. How workers would choose to distribute value among themselves, in any particular enterprise they might control, if owners were not claiming profits, is a choice that is theirs among themselves.