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> We all get paid the same hourly rate regardless of the roles we do. Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then. One of the most repulsing stories tha

• dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then. It's a good wholesaler where employees “multiskill” so that roles re flexible; virtually all skilled professionals are probably outsourced (which isn't uncommon in firms where professional services aren't the core business, even if they aren't coops.) Equal pay isn't a universal (or even dominant) norm for worker coops, though they do tend to have flatter pay structures than traditional firms. > One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers. Which would be germane if we were talking about either the Soviet Union or a system with that feature, which we are not.
• morgante 9y ago
  Seriously. Can you imagine trying to hire a skilled professional who has put years of effort into acquiring a skill when you won't pay them any more than a retail cashier?
  • T2_t2 9y ago
    It depends on the mix of roles in a company I guess, but animal farm comes to mind here: all worker-owners are equal (but some are more equal than others). What happens when the company expands? Do the new employees get equal shares? But these are positive-negatives, i.e. the harm is done by being successful. When the company starts to fail, what then? What happens when a company needs to downsize? Which of the worker-owners will survive, and under what conditions? Will it be political, e.g. we all vote, so the 7 PAs who everyone loves get to stay, but the entire sales department gets voted out? What about if departments vote together? Seems very sketchy. Ironically, the ability to survive failure is why our system perpetuates. In the hard times, hard choices can be made that are individually distasteful, but required. Evolution is driven by the non-dying breeding, and corporate evolution is similar, with company structures that can navigate the bad times - much more than maximise the good times - the ones most likely to be replicated.
  • rayiner 9y ago
    In a world where that was the expectation for everyone, sure. Professional jobs are a hell of a lot more interesting/rewarding than being a cashier. I don’t think you’d have programmers quitting to do service work if they weren’t making more money.
    • wyager 9y ago
      If I didn’t get paid more to do programming than to do a mindless low-effort job like cashiering, I would absolutely switch to being a cashier and use my mental energy on my own time for my own goals. Salaries already price in the “interestingness” of jobs.
      • icebraining 9y ago
        If I didn’t get paid more to do programming than to do a mindless low-effort job like cashiering, I would absolutely switch to being a cashier and use my mental energy on my own time for my own goals. Well, I wouldn't. Dealing with the general public would drain way more of my mental energy than programming. Which leaves us with two anecdotes.
        • gremlinsinc 9y ago
          yeah fuck that... I'm a developer because I'm an introvert, and overweight and want to sit on my ass and NOT talk to anyone all day... anyone who'd rather stand on their feet and do mindless drudgery because they can is insane... My idea of the perfect worker co-op is where cashiers/programmers earn the same but that 'same' is above market value for the top level employee... so say devs go for 100k, cashiers also get 100k. Since there's no CEO/board/etc demanding 10 million/yr+ each then there's plenty to split.
          • icebraining 9y ago
            Since there's no CEO/board/etc demanding 10 million/yr+ each then there's plenty to split. Not really; the thing with the rich is that there aren't that many of them. Take the top 1% - their average income (including the people making billions) is $1.15M. Let's redistribute $1.1M of those. ($1.1M * (1% of population)) / population = 1% of $1.1M = $11k. So each person only gets $11k extra.
  • gremlinsinc 9y ago
    If retail cashiers and engineers at company A earn more than an Engineer at company B, then why not?
    • DougN7 9y ago
      Question: why don’t all companies pay the guy in the mailroom the same as their top scientists and sales people? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not greed at the top (most of the time)
  • wolco 9y ago
    Have you ever been on upwork?
• downrightmike 9y ago
  All sounds good in a free market, you know unless the major players are working together to lower pay intentionally: http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/ http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/
  • golergka 9y ago
    Yeah, it's still a better alternative to fixed pay rate.
  • lugg 9y ago
    Let's not forget that it is culturally considered taboo to talk about money and compensation. Employers hate it when employees talk about what they get paid. If people were turly getting paid what they are worth nobody should feel like they need to hide their paycheck from their colleagues. Yet I'd bet most of the people here complaining about how this wouldn't work for x, y, and z reasons don't actively discuss what they are paid with their peers. Some "free" market alright.
    • Animats 9y ago
      Employers hate it when employees talk about what they get paid. In the US, most employees have a legal right to talk to each other about pay.[1] Supervisory employees may not, but rank and file employees do. State laws go further in some states; in California, non-disclosure terms involving pay are prohibited for all employees. [1] https://www.dol.gov/wb/media/pay_secrecy.pdf https://www.dol.gov/wb/media/pay_secrecy.pdf
• muro 9y ago
  It's a guardian article :)
  • gaius 9y ago
    The Graun comprises writers with double-barrelled names earning 6-figures, and unpaid interns. It’s headquarters are offshore in a tax haven. Draw your own conclusions.
• crdoconnor 9y ago
  The market rewards leverage though, not skills. They only coincide sometimes. Academia is one place in particular where the two do not go together.
  • golergka 9y ago
    Markets rewards what you can give. You can have a lot of very hard to learn and impressive skills that have no economic sense whatsoever. Don't expect to get paid for them.
    • crdoconnor 9y ago
      No, markets reward leverage. This can be about what you can give, it is also about what your alternatives are, what their alternatives are, what you can take away and what you can threaten. You don't need skill or economic sense to have it.
      • jacob019 9y ago
        and markets reward luck
    • TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      Markets reward what you can take. Sometimes you have to give first. But only sometimes.
• vedloseper 9y ago
  Skillfulness to me implies giving a crap about the world you share with others. Skilled, in comparison, is a consolation price. > One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers. That's the most repulsing? Nothing about children and old people being murdered en masse? See above, more skillful grandparents would have told wholly different stories.
  • dang 9y ago
    This comment breaks the HN guidelines twice over: the one that asks you not to take threads on flamewar tangents, plus the one that asks "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do these things when commenting here? They reliably degrade discussion, and we're hoping for better than internet median.
  • closeparen 9y ago
    If you care about the world you live in, you should want the people in it to be good at things. If you’ve studied the world you live in, you’ve likely discovered that this is more readily achieved with material incentives than with propaganda about one’s duty to the state.
  • blorsh 9y ago
    Ah, but why were there children and old people being murdered en masse? It's because humans naturally resist what was being imposed upon them. The smart and able-bodied are going to get more, and they will resist any effort to prevent this. Corruption and workplace theft were rampant in the Soviet Union. Suppression of this resistance requires violence.
• geofft 9y ago
  Isn't it the case that with this sort of system that if you increase your skills, your company is more profitable and therefore you all get paid more? (Which is a common system in capitalist America - the exact same job with the exact same skills at different companies pays differently based on the company's ability to pay, and year-end bonuses are often linked to the company's profits that year. And employees who get stock grants or options are effectively compensated based on the performance of the company, incentivizing them to cause the company to succeed.) That's very different from a system where the government sets pay scales for the entire country, and an individual's efforts cannot make a meaningful change in their own earnings. In the system described in the article, it can.
  • wyager 9y ago
    > Isn't it the case that with this sort of system that if you increase your skills, your company is more profitable and therefore you all get paid more? Your reward is not commensurate with the opportunity cost of improving your output. It gets worse with larger companies.
    • geofft 9y ago
      Sure. But I think that's also true in capitalist America (or, at least, in my / my friends' experience in tech) - at least in the sense that it's much harder to get your current employer to reward you for your own increases in skill than to put the increased skills on your resume and start interviewing elsewhere. I don't know any system (other than perhaps a carefully planned and unusually benevolent and well-funded central economy) that rewards people for the opportunity cost of increasing their skills, as opposed to the increased output gained from using their skills - one advantage of this system is that it's very clear that if I use my skills more efficiently or in a way that helps the company, a portion of that reward will go to me whether or not I can prove it to management. If I save my current traditionally-capitalist employer $1M/year due to cleverness, I'd expect to see $0.00 of that. I'm far more incentivized to get good at writing self-reviews that portray the things I'm already good at in a good light than to learn the skills to, say, optimize our AWS spend.
• balance_factor 9y ago
  > skills and professionalism can be valued by the free market by people competing for them; why, despite pure populism for the lowest common denominator, someone wants to return to something like this, is completely beyond me. The real determination of where the money goes is by the owners of the business. If one looks over the Forbes 400 richest list, we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from the labor of those who work - the Kochs, the Waltons, the Johnson family. The Rockefellers fell off the list in the past few years, $2 billion is the individual cutoff and I suppose Forbes doesn't know of any individual in the family worth more that that. But I can assure you if they and their three siblings are worth 1.5 billion each, and their first cousins are all worth 1.5 billion each, they are not out there breaking the bricks. It's amusing to hear about meritocracy and the rat race for education, skills etc. when these heirs are the people controlling the economy, and causing so many economic and other problems due to its increasing lopsidedness towards them. What are their skills and professionalism that are valued? The money they suck off from those who work is the truest lowest common denominator, rule by parasites. At least Lenin, Stalin and Molotov rose due to their merits, not their birthrights. Russia went from being a country pushed around by the Japanese, with an GDP equivalent to 1917 Brazil, to a superpower sending satellites, men into space, probes to the Moon (the first country to do so). It also had little crime and little poverty. I am supposed to get into a tizzy about someone with less skills getting the same pay as me, when the money is being sent off to the heirs who do no work? I certainly would prefer that the people actually doing the work alongside me get the money.
  • wyager 9y ago
    > we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from the labor of those who work If successful people couldn’t pass ownership onto their heirs, the value of ownership itself would drop dramatically. If Bud and Sam Walton knew they couldn’t pass on their business to their kids, they would either have never done it in the first place or they would structure the business to close out well before they died. Neither of these is good. Most complaints about rational capital allocation, including this one, are based on a failure to generalize or punch through enough layers of indirection.
    • 9y ago
• fancyfish 9y ago
  Equal payment is definitely not the norm for co-ops worldwide. Workers realize they should be paid for their contribution. For example at Mondragón, a network of cooperatives in Spain which employs 75,000 people, workers established a scheme that distributes profits in line with contributions. The difference between this co-op and other businesses is that workers decided to collectively absorb the impact of the Recession, taking a 5% pay cut and shifting jobs between co-ops as needed such that zero workers were fired despite an economic downturn. What you will see is that, for example, instead of top managers of a co-op making hundreds or thousands more than the median employee as in a public corporation, they make a more sensible amount which still attracts and sustains the best talent in the enterprise.
  • maksimum 9y ago
    > make a more sensible amount which still attracts and sustains the best talent in the enterprise. Who should be in charge of how 'sensible' is defined? And how can you argue that it attracts the best talent? Most people outside Spain probably have never heard of Mondragón, but they've almost certainly heard of Google, Facebook, Amazon, AliBaba or Baidu.
    • fancyfish 9y ago
      The workers decide the pay scale. As long as they're satisfied with the performance of the company then there is no need to push for greater and greater pay to the CEO. If they are not attracting talent, they raise the pay scale just as a normal publicly owned company. I agree that those tech companies have greater name recognition.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  • golergka 9y ago
    > What you will see is that, for example, instead of top managers of a co-op making hundreds or thousands more than the median employee as in a public corporation, they make a more sensible amount which still attracts and sustains the best talent in the enterprise. And why, do you think, shareholders don't pursue that strategy? They're giving their own money to CEOs - are they doing it just because they're feeling charitable? In other words, your argument supposes that a LOT of individual actors, independently, pursue a strategy (overpaying execs) that isn't optimal, and you don't even bother with an explanation as to why does it happen. This logical fallacy happens all the time when exec compensation is discussed, and it really bothers me that everyone just assumes that shareholders and board of directors of so many different companies are just plain stupid.
• SlowBro 9y ago
  > Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then. I was thinking exactly the same. I’m spinning up a small technical manufacturing business and my first products will have wireless capabilities. I’d better not pay my wireless engineers and programmers the same price as my unskilled assemblers. The former can save me hundreds of thousands per year with their acquired knowledge; the latter, dozens of dollars over China. And if I ever get big enough to need C-level execs, I’ll never fill the positions with good employees on tech support pay. This world is set up to reward value, not hard work. It’s hard work to dig a ditch, but not terribly valuable. A well-paid, intelligent, quality C-level exec can create more value in a week than a hundred cashiers can in a month.