| > Ideally everyone's income should be derived from the value they generate. Define "value". Or more specifically, how do you measure "value" for jobs that don't directly generate revenue? How much value does the janitorial staff create? How much value does your IT team create? What's the dollar value of your cybersecurity team? What about HR? None of these teams directly create revenue for the company, but certainly they created value. Meanwhile, Amazon has workers that pack boxes. They are directly contributing to revenue by doing the actual work that is core to the business. If cybersecurity, HR, the janitors, or IT were to disappear for a week, theoretically packages would still get sent to customers and Amazon still makes money. And yet they're having to fight for fair wages? They're the most valuable labor in the company! The idea that income should be derived from value is incredibly naive. As I mentioned in another comment, that mentality is what leads to managers laying off the entire IT team because they're seen as a money sink. |
On what other basis do you propose it be derived?
Non-revenue generating roles provide value by allowing the revenue-generating roles to generate revenue. This is the basic concept of specialization. You could likely even take a stab at quantifying this: time spent freeing up revenue-generating roles to generate revenue combined with some kind of supply-and-demand factor.
For example, if I'm a one-man widget shop, hiring a janitor to sweep the floors for me means I can spend that time generating more widgets instead of sweeping floors. The value provided by that janitor is proportional to the additional revenue I generated from those extra widgets, scaled by the large supply of janitors in the labor market.
The idea that income should be derived from value is only naive if you take a fixed view of "value == revenue". No doubt some middle managers have this view, but that's a sign of ignorance and incompetence, not a flaw in the underlying theory itself.