Or to be extra based, distribute accoring to people’s socially-necessary labour-time. E.g. pay the 8hr-day person 20% more than the 6hr-day one. Assuming people’s productivity is average, which is most often the case.
I can see a counter-argument that it would create an incencitive to spend more time where it could be cut down and, also, wiring worker’s paychecks to a sometimes arbitrary and flowing value. Like, you don’t need to clean the outdoors property every day, it depends on the weather, and there I can see paying a stable wage reserving person’s time and paying for it in case I need to call them even if it’s sunny and they don’t actually need to go. As long as they do their job well, who cares. They or a company can reinvest in better tools making their actual worktime even shorter or more comfortable, like, jumping from a manual gardening tools to an automated lawnmower, while not punishing them for working less. Some kinds of labor doesn’t even necessitate being on site, as it was shown by covid, and we see a lot of ideas to cut down on wages due to LLM assistance.
I’m also puzzled about how uneven my work from day to day, and I’d probably prefer to give up on measuring and comparing that at all, defaulting to some lively wage and pulling enough of myself to keep the business afloat. If the idea of a guy over us is in having similar stakes in the business and collectively voting for changes, I see it’s possible to set a fair compensation and keep people interested in the end results.
I am also thinking about this in terms of reserving people’s time. If people decide to take longer to do stuff there’s little you can do to counter that without going down the arduous path of performance metrics, monitoring and evaluations. People can tweak their productivity over 955 regular working schedules where tasks just take longer and project comoletion times stretch further. They just take more free time within the regular schedule. So I suggest time-proportional pay only under the condition where we decide to let some people reserve more of their time to this activity of doing work. But perhaps we don’t want that as there are other side effects too.
E.g. pay the 8hr-day person 20% more than the 6hr-day one.
The problem with that is you’re going to have a hard time actually telling whether the 8hr-day people is actually really doing more than the 6hr-day people.
You just don’t do that. You assume everyone is doing avg productivity for their job. Otherwise you enter the fools errand of performance measurements and evaluation. Assume avg productivity, pay the person who wants to spend 5 days a week proportionally more than the person spending 4 days a week. Or 8hrs vs 6hrs, and so on. Only if you want to allow for some poeple to work more than others. Maybe you don’t. Maybe we shouldn’t.
You assume everyone is doing avg productivity for their job.
On average, people only manage about 4hrs of productivity on any given day - no matter whether you are paying them for 6hrs or 8hrs.
You’re essentially creating conditions for people who just sit around and pretend to work - while the people who cannot spend 8hrs per day at the workplace (like working mothers, for instance) start getting miffed because they can’t access the extra “sitting-around-and-doing-nothing” money.
Otherwise you enter the fools errand of performance measurements and evaluation
You’re going to have to measure and evaluate something. In my experience, corporations loves measuring all the wrong things. They can usually barely even define what “performance” means, never mind measure it correctly.
It’s not evaluation that’s the problem… it’s the people deciding what should be evaluated that’s almost always the problem.
You’re going to have to measure and evaluate something. In my experience, corporations loves measuring all the wrong things. They can usually barely even define what “performance” means, never mind measure it correctly.
I’m wondering if there is even the right way to do that in most trades, and moreso a uniformal way to do it across several activities. Maybe the whole conversation is misleading and inescapably drive you off the path, because the problem itself is erroneously set. Like this blurry line when you start to care about genetics that much it start to smell like eugenics. Measuring people’s worth in money does leave this bitter taste, and under capitalism you are supposed to do so to get by, if not as a boss, but as a worker estimating own value convertable into quality of life. It wasn’t always the case, and probably, the bright future is when we will abandon this concept and would freely replicate food from reusable and abundant energy traversing space and searching for it’s many wonders.
The reason anything is so difficult to measure under the capitalist mode of production is simple… corporate subterfuge.
Here’s a corporate talking head caught in a moment of (highly) abberrant honesty -
"We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell fifteen-cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue, from which our tenants can pay us our rent.” - former McDonald’s CFO, Harry J. Sonneborn
What this means is that the employees (in the case of McDonalds) can devise a million and one methods to measure say, the quality of the food or the experience customers have… none of it will really matter because the capitalists at the top doesn’t actually care - the actual measurements they care about is rarely communicated down the line with such honesty for very obvious reasons… they want their employees and customers to believe that McDonalds actually gives a damn about the stuff they sell people. The truth of the matter is, they don’t.
Measuring and evaluating things isn’t rocket science - it’s something people have been doing for centuries. But measurement and evaluation is only possible if the people in power wants something to be honestly measured and evaluated.
Or to be extra based, distribute accoring to people’s socially-necessary labour-time. E.g. pay the 8hr-day person 20% more than the 6hr-day one. Assuming people’s productivity is average, which is most often the case.
I can see a counter-argument that it would create an incencitive to spend more time where it could be cut down and, also, wiring worker’s paychecks to a sometimes arbitrary and flowing value. Like, you don’t need to clean the outdoors property every day, it depends on the weather, and there I can see paying a stable wage reserving person’s time and paying for it in case I need to call them even if it’s sunny and they don’t actually need to go. As long as they do their job well, who cares. They or a company can reinvest in better tools making their actual worktime even shorter or more comfortable, like, jumping from a manual gardening tools to an automated lawnmower, while not punishing them for working less. Some kinds of labor doesn’t even necessitate being on site, as it was shown by covid, and we see a lot of ideas to cut down on wages due to LLM assistance.
I’m also puzzled about how uneven my work from day to day, and I’d probably prefer to give up on measuring and comparing that at all, defaulting to some lively wage and pulling enough of myself to keep the business afloat. If the idea of a guy over us is in having similar stakes in the business and collectively voting for changes, I see it’s possible to set a fair compensation and keep people interested in the end results.
I am also thinking about this in terms of reserving people’s time. If people decide to take longer to do stuff there’s little you can do to counter that without going down the arduous path of performance metrics, monitoring and evaluations. People can tweak their productivity over 955 regular working schedules where tasks just take longer and project comoletion times stretch further. They just take more free time within the regular schedule. So I suggest time-proportional pay only under the condition where we decide to let some people reserve more of their time to this activity of doing work. But perhaps we don’t want that as there are other side effects too.
The problem with that is you’re going to have a hard time actually telling whether the 8hr-day people is actually really doing more than the 6hr-day people.
You just don’t do that. You assume everyone is doing avg productivity for their job. Otherwise you enter the fools errand of performance measurements and evaluation. Assume avg productivity, pay the person who wants to spend 5 days a week proportionally more than the person spending 4 days a week. Or 8hrs vs 6hrs, and so on. Only if you want to allow for some poeple to work more than others. Maybe you don’t. Maybe we shouldn’t.
On average, people only manage about 4hrs of productivity on any given day - no matter whether you are paying them for 6hrs or 8hrs.
You’re essentially creating conditions for people who just sit around and pretend to work - while the people who cannot spend 8hrs per day at the workplace (like working mothers, for instance) start getting miffed because they can’t access the extra “sitting-around-and-doing-nothing” money.
You’re going to have to measure and evaluate something. In my experience, corporations loves measuring all the wrong things. They can usually barely even define what “performance” means, never mind measure it correctly.
It’s not evaluation that’s the problem… it’s the people deciding what should be evaluated that’s almost always the problem.
I’m wondering if there is even the right way to do that in most trades, and moreso a uniformal way to do it across several activities. Maybe the whole conversation is misleading and inescapably drive you off the path, because the problem itself is erroneously set. Like this blurry line when you start to care about genetics that much it start to smell like eugenics. Measuring people’s worth in money does leave this bitter taste, and under capitalism you are supposed to do so to get by, if not as a boss, but as a worker estimating own value convertable into quality of life. It wasn’t always the case, and probably, the bright future is when we will abandon this concept and would freely replicate food from reusable and abundant energy traversing space and searching for it’s many wonders.
The reason anything is so difficult to measure under the capitalist mode of production is simple… corporate subterfuge.
Here’s a corporate talking head caught in a moment of (highly) abberrant honesty -
What this means is that the employees (in the case of McDonalds) can devise a million and one methods to measure say, the quality of the food or the experience customers have… none of it will really matter because the capitalists at the top doesn’t actually care - the actual measurements they care about is rarely communicated down the line with such honesty for very obvious reasons… they want their employees and customers to believe that McDonalds actually gives a damn about the stuff they sell people. The truth of the matter is, they don’t.
Measuring and evaluating things isn’t rocket science - it’s something people have been doing for centuries. But measurement and evaluation is only possible if the people in power wants something to be honestly measured and evaluated.