Equal Pay

[andrewducker]

News here that companies have been told that length of service is _not_ a good enough reason to pay people more.

And, I have to say, about bloody time too.

True, longer service can lead to greater levels of experience and thus better productivity and usefulness from an employee - but it doesn't have to. If someone is being more productive/useful then they should be rewarded for that - paying them for length of service is jut a lazy way to avoid thinking about someone's actual contribution.

It also biases the system against women. It's very easy to justify paying women less when you can point out they've taken a year (or two) off to raise kids - but unless that has an actual, demonstrable affect on their levels of productivity, it's irrelevant.

Comments

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I own a company and person A has been there for 20 years. They're no more talented than person B who I just hired but they stuck with me through thick and thin, through the months everyone got paid weeks late, through the low times when the company wasn't doing well and everyone was taking pay cuts, they stuck with me with diligence and belief that things would get better when others walked out. Finally the company's doing better, so I hired person B who happens to know just as much about their job as person A. However, person B might well quit in a week for an extra £1000-a-year elsewhere but I'm not allowed to reward person A with higher pay (do bonuses come into this, as conceivably they should) even though I know they'll continue to stick with me due to the intense loyalty they've shown in the past?

Sure, not all situations are like this, but doesn't company loyalty count for something? If so, how would you deal with this situation?

Generally speaking, I like the idea of this law though. I just reckon it'll screw over some peopple whilst helping others.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

Presumably there would be some way to objectively pay person A more based on experience. It's only a decision purely based on length of service which is dodgy.

[guyinahat.livejournal.com]

I think the problem here is you're defining talent to exclude company loyalty. For appraisal situations, I would think talent shouldn't just be technical skills, but also the wider picture of what someone brings to the company.

Whether the law will allow that though...

[andrewducker]

If you're rewarding person A for sticking about then give them a reward - a bonus for doing so, or make up the pay that they lost in the cut. Paying them more year-on-year for doing the same work isn't the right way to reward them for single actions.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

But what if you want to reward continuing loyalty? Because hiring and training people costs a lot of money, you'd prefer to have low staff turnover. It also leads to a nicer workplace environment, so how do you do that apart from rewarding people for staying? A yearly bonus based on how long they've stuck around? That's the same as paying them more for sticking with the company.

I'm still not saying the law is right-minded to stop people using time-served as an indicator for pay, but I still think that perfectly sensible time-serve-related attributes that companies actively like will be unfairly challenged.

[andrewducker]

And I think it's exactly this they're trying to discourage - rewarding people just for hanging about.

And I have to agree that rewarding people for just this is a terrible idea - recruitment costs make it worthwhile to keep people on for a bit, but not indefinitely. And if it's expensive to replace someone whose been there for 6 years it's equally as expensive to replace someone whose been there a year.

If by sticking about they've become more knowledgable and better at their job, reward them for _that_.