[turc1656]

I did mention a pay ethic and you even quoted it - "...basic common sense when it comes to employee compensation and morale." I also indicated that if the OP didn't feel they were being fairly compensated they should have a discussion about it and if the outcome is not appropriate that they should leave, presumably because there is either a mismatch of opinion regarding OP's skill set and what it is worth, or that employer is part of the ones that don't have common sense. Employees leaving is one of the natural checks on the power balance between employees and employers in the free market. And in the industry that most here on HN work for, it is easier than most to find a job elsewhere as the tech industry is in high demand for skilled employees.

It's not mind-blowing when you consider that productivity is heavily linked to technological advances. Let's take a historical example - the barcode scanner. Prior to its creation, cashiers had to know the price of all items or check the price tags that were manually stickered onto every item by someone else in the store. Then someone came along and made it possible to have UPC's printed right onto the original packaging and then scanned instantaneously at the register, with essentially no errors ever. That both reduced the skill required by the cashiers as well as boosting (drastically) productivity. Yet no additional effort, creativity, or skill was required on the part of the cashier. If a tool comes along that makes my job easier and/or more accurate my employer will pay for it, but I'd be really surprised if they suddenly gave me a pay boost because of it.

The other half of this is that welfare programs subsidize the lower income workers. WalMart would not be able to pay <$10 an hour if welfare did not exist. If people didn't have the government as a backstop, you can guarantee they would stand up and demand a higher wage so that they could meet their basic needs.

[harrumph]

I think we should not use terms like "common sense" when describing totally uncommon practices.

Wages aren't stagnant by accident -- far from it. The constantly repeated, default decision by boardrooms to unlink compensation from productivity and thereby suppress wages is in fact the overwhelming, prevailing "common sense" of the really existing world. This goes hand in hand with the systematic expropriation by ownership of the surplus value created by workers.

This situation persists because persons with your perspective cheerlead it on, in part by moralizing on worker compensation while totally ignoring the moral calculus of ownership's claim to the surplus value created by workers. That's what you did here:

>Yet no additional effort, creativity, or skill was required on the part of the cashier [...] [therefore they deserve no share of their expanded productivity]

Fact: if additional effort, creativity and skill was a bona fide prerequisite for receiving expanded compensation linked to productivity, then dividend compensation for nonworking stockholders would never flow -- let alone grow to the astronomic, middle-class-savaging intensity it has today.

[turc1656]

I've taken several days to consider your comment. I believe you are largely correct after giving it some thorough thought. Workers should receive additional compensation for increased productivity. Obviously, they would not receive the entire productivity gain, but they should receive some portion of it. If they can use new technology to create an additional $5 an hour in value, maybe they should receive something like $2 in additional compensation.

Where we probably disagree on the reason, though. To me, it comes down to an individual's overall slice of the monetary pie. Since money is just a representation of value, it's basically just a number inside of a larger system that we utilize. All that matters really is your portion of the whole. Let's use GDP as a gauge. The US has ~18.5T in GDP per year. Let's cut off some zeroes (6 of them) to get some more usable numbers. For a person making $10 an hour, that's about 20k a year, or 20,000/18,500,000=0.108%. If GDP increases 4% in 2 years but their wage only goes up 2.5% that would be 20,500/19,240,000=0.1065%. This means that they now have lost some purchasing power relative to everyone else because their share of GDP has decreased.

Now that's a moral argument, to be sure, because there is still supply and demand for labor that is a dominant for in the labor markets. So if someone else is going to work for $9 an hour, that's going to be a problem. There are many factors at at play.

But thanks for getting me to re-think my position on this.

[harrumph]

>But thanks for getting me to re-think my position on this.

I'm equally grateful you considered our conversation.

Worker ownership and worker governance of enterprises, in my view, is the general way forward. I suggest to anybody reconsidering commerce under capitalism take a look at the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation for a living example of super-productive commerce and industry that employs tens of thousands without the baked-in inequality that drives so many social ills.

Cheers!