[gruez]

> You can have both ways which I'm shocked isn't more common. Everyone in the same position gets paid the same, if anyone negotiates higher for themselves everyone gets a pay bump to match. Now you get paid max(individual rate, group rate).

Except this misses the fact that negotiating for your own pay raise is now suddenly harder. Suppose there's a company with 100 non-supervisory employees, each of which $200k worth of value for the company, gets paid $100k. Under a regime where everyone's pay is automatically bumped up to the highest rate, if you're trying to negotiate a $10k raise for yourself, you're actually negotiating for the company to part with $1M ($10k * 1000 employees). Without such a regime, a negotiated $10k raise for yourself only costs the company $10k. Obviously negotiating in the latter situation would be easier to pull off.

Of course, the real world is more complicated than this, because the union can hire trained negotiators or whatever, but your simplistic model of "max(individual rate, group rate) so everyone wins" makes no sense.