Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

Re:Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless... by geofft on Sunday March 11, 2018 @04:52PM (#16564717)

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.

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Re:Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless... by wyager on Sunday March 11, 2018 @04:58PM (#16564741)

> 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.

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Re:Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless... by geofft on Sunday March 11, 2018 @05:45PM (#16564941)

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.

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