Almost like it demoralizes people that care about their work while incentivizing people to simply put in the hours and not give a fuck.
You’re right, but I don’t know that we as socialists should encourage this framing. It allows too much room for CEOs and PMC ghouls to point towards market growth parameters (which are still stolen labour abstacted into capitalist numerology) and claim this justifies their obscene salaries.
I can also see how this line of reasoning could be twisted to support underpaying those perceived as being less productive because the chosen metric fails to capture their contributions.
The framing, even if it were made in good faith (which I doubt), is still woke capitalism at best. No amount of optimisation will make wage labour fair and no amount of emplyee fulfillment research will stop capitalist alienation. These are baked into the code of the system.
Cool, who cares? If someone who “cares” about their work is demoralised by the “lazy bastards” getting as much money as them, they’re fucked in the head and need reprogramming.
I don’t care about my coworkers dicking around on the job because I know that we don’t get paid more for working harder anyway and it leads to more of us just putting in the hours and not giving a fuck. I think people took the wrong message from what I said, perhaps I could have worded it better? That and they deserve better pay to begin with just for putting up with a job that sucks and is dehumanizing.
Don’t support piecework you fucking nerds.
fuck yeah! fuck with our ability to feed and clothe ourselves to “motivate” us to work “harder”!
and of course, they’d surely not end up spending less on wages than they were to begin with
no way jose.
This is such a flawed reddit tier idea by the type of people who don’t support unionizing because of the logic that “it will make it impossible for their bosses to reward their hard work”.
No consulting firm that recommends Amazon/Wallmart/McDonalds implement “accomplishment based compensation” is going to be selling their idea on the basis that it will allow for them to pay more money to their employees for the same amount of productivity.
Also, this would only undermine worker solidarity. Unions must act to protect those in less materially/physically privileged positions. I can easily imagine this sort of compensation would only become an excuse to remove elderly employees, or those experiencing mental/physical health problems. Sure, they can stay working, but only if they are willing to take “minimum salaries for minimum achievements”.
Finally, if there’s one thing I learned from Bullshit Jobs, it’s that so many people don’t work hard because they see their jobs as utterly pointless, if everyone was able to work at least some sort of fulfilling job, or even receive training/freedom if none are available, I guarantee average job satisfaction and productivity would skyrocket. Look no further than the masses of people willing to build railroads without compensation in Sankara’s Burkina Faso to see that.
I read an argument by a sports writer months ago that probably the toughest part of being a pro-athlete, one almost never talked about, is the supersaturation of stats and how they’re treated as though they measure ones entire value. Basically, baseball players get so much self-worth from their WAR, and Ballers from their PPG, that to experience a fall off in one of these stats can be emotionally devastating, particularly because you know it’ll lead to a smaller pay in the future. Meanwhile you have guys like Morey, 538, or Sabermetrics diehards, who really do believe that you can come up with an advanced stat so perfect that it will account for someones entire worth as a player.
No one sympathizes with this painful aspect of being a professional athlete though, because they get paid so high that we don’t think they have a right to complain. But make no mistake, soon there will be a Basketball-reference equivalent for Amazon employees, your pay will be based on what an algorithm spits out, and only then will we be able to emphasize with what having a bunch of numbers determine how million of people value you feels like.
