Comment on Companies lower salaries in job postings as pay transparency laws take effect
nandeEbisu@lemmy.world 8 months agoThe 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.
unfreeradical@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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 labor process 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, often through commodity markets.
Ultimately, there is no law of nature affirming the distinctively quantified value of each worker’s labor. Neither is there any law of nature proscribing each worker from receiving the same rate of rumuneration for each unit of time contributed to the social processes of labor. A social choice for such practices would be possible to implement.
nandeEbisu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
unfreeradical@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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 an 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 of 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 worker’s value to the social processes of production within the enterprise.
nandeEbisu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.