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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 entitiesfailure 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.
Google and Meta started hurting other giant corporations though. That’s a big no no.
