5d ago

Democratic wages??? edit: never mind, it was a terrible idea that has many large holes

What if wages for everyone in a company are regularly voted on by the rest of the company? For example, if the manager isn’t doing their job, their wages are lowered by vote. If the manager tries to lower the wages of the workers to a horribly low level, it could either a) be overruled by the majority, or b) the manager’s wages are lowered suit, pressuring them to increase it.

This is probably a really stupid idea that is extremely prone to corruption, but why?

edit: yep this really is a stupid idea

edit 2: someone mentioned that this is kinda like trade unions, where workers can negotiate pay, but in a really horrible method where it becomes a "popularity contest".

I do think that someone else's idea of keeping the every employee's wages some % of the manager/CEO/whatever's wages so that they aren't incentivised to keep inflating their wages is pretty decent.

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Mfers will literally do anything to avoid reading Marx.
- what?
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital

The very premise of this assumes that everyone is aware of what everyone else's job is including all of their responsibilities, that they can objectively judge how well they do their job, that they will not base their decisions based on personal or identity biases (particularly against protected classes), that they have an understanding or even basic knowledge of company budget and financials, and that they can be trusted to properly weigh the financial health of the company with the relatively value each individual's contributions and the desire for one's own personal gain.
I would argue that almost no person in an company bigger than 10 people is capable of most (if any) of these. Not that existing company structures are always great at all of these, nor are they usually incentivized to pay people their true worth, but the system you proposed would likely lead to massive issues in any company. Financial issues, personal issues, etc. Even if a company like this were to survive, you would likely see rampant turnover for women, minorities, young people, and anyone else that is likely to be under paid by the might of the majority that believes they are worth less than their white male seniors. Likewise, the "nice" guy manager that does do his job in the slightest but is fun to hang out with is more likely to get a raise than the serious managers who actually keep the company working and on profitable endeavors, which is likely to lose everyone their jobs when the company is no longer profitable. There are more problems with this, but that should be enough to see the pitfalls here.

I agree that this a colossally stupid idea.
However, it has the virtue of not being every other word I read online. For the novelty of it, I thank you.

Holy shit any company I've worked at has been political enough. This would be absurdly detrimental to mental health..
While in concept I agree. I would rather see a wage tier approach where the lowest paid employee can never be less than say 10% of the CEO (total compensation) then managesr say 40% (managers make no more that 2.5x the lowest) and executives 25%. Something like that.
I would love that ensrined in law. Maybe not those numbers but fuck it, make it a party platform and set it at the government level. And don't give the CEO's some kind of consulting loophole.
I say this as someone that makes a well above average wage.
- This is a really stupid idea, indeed. To be fair, the idea that the lowest paid employee should be some % of the CEO’s does make sense. Maybe not 10%, but a % would be better than minimum wage. It would also mean that CEOs can’t just keep on increasing their wages every year
  
  Yeah my numbers are just examples but he idea is there.

You might want to edit the title to include the actual question.
but as for the question itself... Ahm. just on a pragmatic side... "the rest of the company..." might be something that could be reasonably done on a small company (less than a 250 people. Probably less than 50 people, actually,) but in any large company, you may as well send out a poll asking what kind of soup they prefer- Chicken or Pea Soup- and which ever manager backing the losing soup gets the axe.
The only people who might be aware of how hard any given person works are going to be the team members alongside them and the direct reports above and below them.
And to be perfectly blunt, working hard doesn't necessarily translate to work getting done. if the manager is just spinning their wheels and not getting the core stuff done, it's a problem. If the manager is spending too much time on things that simply don't matter... it's a problem.
Ultimately, even if you can have a reasonable belief that every one knows what every one else does and doesn't do (that sounds like hell, actually.) it turns into a popularity contest and the manager whose actually keeping things running might not get recognized by it, where the manager throwing parties and blowing cash does. One might say I'm being a stick in the mud, but the reality is, if the managers stop facilitating the work their people do... then the company fails. No parties. no jobs. no company.
- Yeah, wouldn’t really work for a huge company. Most people don’t know EVERYONE in the whole company. Also, more popular people would have an unfair advantage
  
  functionally, it wouldn't work for anything more than a very small start up. just on the practical side.
  it's not just a question of unfair advantage. It's a bald faced stupid way to run a company. you cannot make everyone happy, and a good manager isn't going to be the most liked person in the room.
  Human nature means most people won't be invested in making a sound business decision. they're going to invest as much thought into it as voting in a poll about what soup is their favorite. maybe considerably less.

If the company fails, the responsibility for that is not on the workers. Why would they care if it does, if they can just extract all of the money for themselves?
The responsibility for managing the company should be on the people that are responsible for the company itself.
This is not to say, that they should not be represented in decisionmaking, they probably should, but since they do not own the organisations that employ them, they have no right to dictate how they should be run.

You should look into how co-ops function, since those are basically democratic.
- even inside co-ops, employee compensation is not set by popular vote. Generally, the Co-Op members will vote on a board that controls the business.
  
  Exactly

If you want a more egalitarian workplace I'm afraid the only solution is to remove the capitalists siphoning off the surplus value created by the labor of the workers. Co-ops are one way to do this on the small scale, but especially in the US they will have a hard time competing with giant corporations which is why they aren't common anymore: they've largely been driven out of most markets by much larger entities.
- they've largely been driven out of most markets by ~~much larger entities~~ failure to enforce antitrust law.
  FTFY.
  
  Indeed. It's frankly surprising that they're pursuing antitrust cases against Google and Meta now, cause since the break-up of AT&T we've spent a lot of years not giving a shit about how anti-competitive giant corporations are.

It is prone to all sorts of bad. Humans are bad. We need reason to keep it in check.
- Humans are imperfect and we must accept that.

The biggest problem I see is that people don’t always understand others’ jobs and how to judge if they are doing them well. I know this will be unpopular but managers are the key example here. Everyone thinks they know who the good and bad managers are but until you’ve been one, you dont understand their job to truly know more than who you like and who you don’t like. That’s no way to decide anyone’s pay.

That sounds very much like what unions do in Australia, kind of.
Workers negotiate pay as a collective.

Most people just aren't equipped to decide how much someone else should earn. Firstly they might be unable to be objective about people they know. Secondly they don't have the appropriate skills and experience to evaluate someone's performance.
Due to the first issue, that would make the whole thing a popularity contest. You'd pretty much have to "campaign" to ensure everyone liked you. Who cares about productivity when all that really matters is that everyone likes you.
Instead of voting for someone's salary, key personnel are evaluated by asking stakeholders to score them on whatever metrics. Stakeholders should include staff and clients and suppliers, et cetera.
Based on their performance you can determine an appropriate bonus.
- Yeah, that’s probably why lots of companies have specialists that focus on managing the finances.

The problem with most companies is that they are not led by people with clear visions.
Companies that succeed typically start with a clear vision. However, once that vision is fulfilled, then it starts to become run by people who are simply trying to make money.
Chasing after money becomes the vision, and that is how you get to the way things are in America today.
Having a vision often times means having goals that you're willing to lose money if it gets you closer to achieving them.
That being said, ratuer than voting for your paycheck, something that is much more straightforward and less prone to being taken advantage of would be having set wages based on years of experience and time with the company.
include an opportunity to earn extra during the year by going above and beyond while making it clear that this is not expected of the people at their current job role.
Going above and beyond would be determined by your boss on recommendation, and they would have a limited number of recommendations every year.
Another thing you could do would be to publish what everybody earns on a website that is internal to the company, and make the going above and beyond rewards part of your annual meeting or something so nobody would know if they're going to get an above and beyond reward until then.
Then to actually make it a good thing, you would need to make it a rule to fire the people that do not meet their performance metrics, at least after a set number of times or like failing to fulfill a pip or something.
- yeah my idea is stupid. Your idea of setting wages based on experience could be good
  
  Its not stupid to be optimistic. Every good thing starts with optimism as far as I know

I get paid for my skill and ability to do the job. Not based on what other random people think
- fair

Generally, I like that idea, but I can also see some ways it would fail.
People vote based on what they know, and there’s a limit to what people can know. In a small company, you can easily know everyone, but in a massive corporation, you simply run into some human limitations in this regard.
Some people have a highly visible job, like someone in IT tech support. If you have problems with your computer, and tech support is able to help you out, you’ll happily vote for that guy to get a raise.
However, the IT boss made the arrangements for a server upgrade, so your storage space didn’t come close to running out. Do you even know what goes on in the background? No. Would you vote for the IT boss to get a raise, since you have no idea how they’ve contributed to your wellbeing? Probably not.
Also, some people will find ways to make their minuscule efforts look much grander than they deserve to be seen as. If that works out, they’ll get lots of votes and pay rises even though their contributions are hardly worth mentioning, which actually sounds a lot like the situation we’re currently in.
The thing is, when everything is running smoothly, you don’t even know who fixed what. If things break, you may have some idea whose fault it is, but that’s not guaranteed either. We can’t just wait for things to break so that the guy who fixes it could become famous and popular. Ideally, people would avert disasters rather than put out fires, and that would a be a far more efficient way to run a company. This sort of voting system could result in horrible inefficiency and pressure to be seen and loved.
People could also cooperate. What if a manager promises a coffee machine that gives free coffee if he gets a raise? Maybe the workers could vote for that, but should they really? What if the workers pool their votes to give one of their own a raise? They could rotate who gets the raise, so that each of them gets a raise when it’s their turn. Oh, and that sort of cooperative voting system could be used as a bullying instrument. You could discriminate one of the workers just because they have the wrong skin color, wrong accent, wrong family name or whatever. I’m sure people would come up with all sorts of messed up ways to abuse this system.
But the big questions is: Would this be better than the current system? Maybe, but we would need to set up some rules first. Doing it wild-wild-west style would be a complete disaster. Then again, the current system has some serious problems too, so…
- yeah this coukd be 100% abused.

One thing you will eventually find out is there is a good portion of the company who thinks they are an effective employee when they really aren't. For example I work in Software and Hardware development. In 25 years I've worked in large companies and small, big teams, small teams and teams of one. I've had many project managers and in almost all cases they have ranged from bad to pointless. The well oiled teams found the project managers only got in the way and provided no ROI to their work. So much so that in one org the PM left and they never replaced them which resulted in the teams highest productive quarters two years running.
If we were to vote I'd ask for justification for those roles and what their returns are. What actual added benefit did they bring and what problems did they cause. The issue i foresee is that every single one of them would say they were very valuable and important. But if you asked the people under them doing the actual development you'd hear the exact opposite. With the pandemic and everyone working remotely you'd think their role would become even more important but a lot of places have shown that haven't.

39 comments