[tdfx]

Workers should not be expected to be paid "fairly" or according to some broader social expectation. The company is not your friend and you are not the company's friend. They are paying you for sacrificing your time for their benefit. You are worth exactly the minimum that you're willing to accept in payment based on your individual circumstances.

[gjulianm]

"Expecting" is not the same as hoping that things would change.

> You are worth exactly the minimum that you're willing to accept in payment based on your individual circumstances

This is what I would like to change. There's an asymmetry of power in employment (if you lose an employee it's just a nuisance, if a person loses employment it can destroy their life) that is exploited by business and it can lead to terrible situations, such as people that are generating value for a company that posts heavy benefits but in return they don't even get a living wage.

[tdfx]

> such as people that are generating value for a company

Attempting to quantify this is exactly why we're in the situation that we are. If it was easy to quantify a person's "value" to the company relative to other workers, perhaps we would live in a different world. But it's not as simple as "salesman X received Y sales this month, 20% of that is Z". Who determines the hidden value of the marketing effort? How much of that should be allocated to the engineers who build and maintain the product? What about the people who find the talent to hire? Who would want to clean the toilets if the janitor wasn't here?

After that kind of thought experiment it becomes abundantly clear that there's no meaningfully objective way to quantify a worker's value as a percentage of company profit. Each person's perspective will color their estimation of a particular worker's value. An objectively bad solution.

The present way of doing things is not a result of any attempt at fairness or idealogical belief in the equality of man, it's really just the simplest working solution to the problem that anyone has been able to demonstrate.

[gjulianm]

I agree that quantifying value brought by someone is extremely hard. I think market rate (when the demand of employees is high enough) works as the consensus of how much does a worker generate.

> it's really just the simplest working solution to the problem that anyone has been able to demonstrate.

'Working solution' is a stretch. There is a lot of people working below a living wage in companies that still post significant profits, where top executives receive salaries several orders of magnitude higher than those employees. That does not seem adjusted to me.

And don't get me wrong, solutions to this problem are hard and I know it, the system is complex. But situations like paying less to remote workers when they do the same work are incredibly clear and easy to solve, and they show that it's not only that it's difficult, it is that those business do not care at all about making things fair for their employees.