But All Salaries Are ‘Competitive’ Aren’t They?
There’s a very good reason we don’t let the market do what the market does best. Exploitation.
If you’re employed and have a salary, I want you to go and tell everyone else you work with what your salary is right now. Why? I’m anti-racist and I’m pro-feminism. Woke as hell. Look at that! What a twist! Penguin joins the identity based dark side.
Don’t get too excited, unlike the morass of screeching self-contradictory woke perpetually banging on about melanin and genitals, I have an actionable plan. A cunning plan if you will. Two words long. Economic transparency.
It’s universalist as it applies to the entire workforce — implementation will help those disproportionately affected by the status quo.
My female friend is underpaid
Yesterday I had a friend round to work in my house. We both work from home but we’re both extroverts. Instead of paying an extortionate amount of money to sit in a corporate office we take it in turns to host each other.
I lay about with different colour index cards (beat sheets) and think about how characters might behave during narratives. She has a ‘proper job’ and works in finance technology.
This is called ‘FinTech’ which, if pushed, I would’ve guessed was a brand of goggles or surfboards.
She took a lot of calls and spoke nonsense words about payment structures — I tried to decide whether two imaginary people should be gay or not. A busy day for both of us. A longstanding problem with a troublesome account was settled for her — and I put a pair of teenage lesbians in the 1960s and dealt with the narrative consequences.
I even opened a new packet of cards.
She’s in the process of looking for a new job — she discovered that someone (another woman) doing the same job as her was on a much higher wage. She’s about as tolerant of injustice as I am, demanded a raise, didn’t get one and is planning to jump ship at the first available opportunity. There’s a lot of conversations with recruiters
Said recruiters keep trying to baffle her with nonsense like…
Such benefits include:
A happy office with plenty of chances to socialise both in and out of work within a friendly working environment
A quarterly trip to the head offices in Paris
A day off for your birthday
A competitive salary
So let me do what she did with her forthright nature and shit on these biscuits straight away.
A happy office with plenty of chances to socialise and a friendly work environment isn’t a centrally controlled benefit a company can offer. If Tony in payroll is a fascist bellend and Poppy from HR can’t string a sentence together then said happy office will be filled with fascists and idiots.
Lest we forget, the Nazi party had a happy corporate structure with chances to socialise both in and out of work.
Most people have their own friends. I have my own friends. I am prepared to accept that I might make friends with people I work with, but this isn’t something I need centrally controlled by a benevolent overlord. If I want to make friends with people in an office environment, that’s on me.
A business trip is not a holiday, there may be drinking, there may be nights out and Karaoke… but it’s hardly a week in Ibiza with your pants off or a weekend in the Seychelles. There are very few people of their own volition who would use their accrued holiday time to visit head office. Not a perk.
Not even a little bit perky. Now… taking a day off for my birthay.
I’d take a day off for my birthday if I really wanted a day off for my birthday. Sure it’s nice that I wouldn’t lose a day’s holiday… but this is an easy fix by any HR ghoul in a suit.. even the fictional Poppy from my previous paragraph could do it.
You tell people they’re entitled to 14 days holiday instead of 15… then allow them the fifteenth day as a ‘birthday’. You’re rebranding actual entitlement as a favour so you come out looking just swell.
I once sat through a psychology lecture where a man who sounded like Alan Partridge dismantled altruism concept by concept to prove it doesn’t exist on an individual level. I’ve been sceptical of altruism since then and doubly sceptical of altruism when done by corporations or businesses.
But it’s the last three words they’re offering that really get my blood boiling. Those last three words are meaningless.
All salaries are competitive
If I waddled my Penguin ass to the starting blocks of the 100m sprint at the next Olympic games… I would be a competitor.
At my fastest, back in the day, I could run the 100m in about 13 seconds. These days, I reckon maybe 15 if there’s a paramedic team on standby and I’m allowed to throw up on my own shoes.
Sure, the other runners might beat me by 5 seconds (or half the length of the track) but I’d still be a competitor. So saying ‘competitive salary’ means you will get ‘a salary’. It’s nonsense word salad. It’s there to make you feel good… but here’s what it really means.
We want you to tell us what you think the market value is and then we’ll get as close to the bottom end of the salary bracket as we possibly can. Over here in the UK competitive salary often means ‘minimum wage’. They don’t want to state that.
When employers write ‘competitive salary’ instead of the actual salary, they’re hedging their bets. Capitalism either believes in free-market movement or it doesn’t.
So here’s the question we have to answer — does a Western Democratic nation believe in healthy competition on wages or not? If it does, then it should have no problem publishing exactly what you get in your salary — minus all the guff about day trips and nice colleagues.
Everyone is interested in the salary first and foremost so we have to sit through interviews pretending we aren’t is baffling. It’s a masterclass in avoiding the obvious. People have to pretend to care about all the other hoops tricks and whistles thrown in.
Tell me more about dress down Friday. Jan in accounts is lovely, but she’s not paying my sodding heating bill is she?
If you publish the salary and you get ZERO applicants for your job, the salary you have posted is too low. If you post a job that is so easy it hurts and put the salary at $100,000 a year, you’re going to have a lot of applicants.
There’s an analysis that needs to happen. That’s market forces at work.
The same argument applies the other end of the market. You bring out a widget and ZERO people buy it, you have priced it too high. If you price it too low and everyone buys it and you can’t make enough of them then you’ll go out of business. Market forces.
That’s when you have to start convincing idiots to pay the twat-tax on ‘luxury items’. If you’re prepared to pay $4,000 extra dollars because this bag was handcrafted by some dead French guy, that’s on you.
You’ll also find yourself going on work excursions and believing in the benevolence of a corporation.
So what can we do?
Exactly what I suggested. Everyone in the workforce needs to share their salaries with everyone else. The BBC got into a lot of trouble when it was revealed they’d been paying their female employees a lot less than the men for the same job.
Now before we set off on a man kicking exercise and shouting the word patriarchy at the top of our voices, let’s remember, the men didn’t know what the women were paid either.
But this sort of thing shouldn’t be solely happening at the top end of society, it should be happening at every level of society. Salaries, including fictional benefits, should be published online and that information should be available for everyone to see in a simple search.
First and foremost it’ll begin a race in lower-paid jobs to hold onto the best employees. If you work in a bar and another bar opens in town offering more money, you’re likely to move there. The bar you’re working at can either offer you a raise, let you go, or find other incentives for you to stay.
Those won’t be bullshit like ‘come with us on a jolly holiday to HQ’ or ‘a great work environment’, they’ll need to be meaningful incentives. It’ll be opportunities for training, shares in the company, a chance to progress upwards to a better salary or some tangible difference in your working condition.
Secondly, it’ll allow society to rebalance the pay for the worst jobs. If your job is cleaning up vomit in public toilets and you realise you can make a few more dollars an hour being a receptionist, you might consider a career change. You might seriously consider it.
We might start to wonder why we’ve given politicians pay rise after pay rise but have stagnated the wages of teachers. We might have an exodus from certain job markets. Great. It means those markets DO NOT WORK. The cost of that work is undervalued and needs to be addressed within a free-market model. Pay those who care for the elderly the wages they deserve rather than letting share holders walk away with mammoth profits.
There will be other knock-on effects too. Widespread quitting when nepotism occurs. You suddenly find your boss has given his nephew a job and a high salary, but the young lad can’t differentiate between his arse and his elbow… mass walkouts. Bosses would think a lot more carefully about the knock-on effects of emoloying family after the first genetic bellend goes off like an incompetence bomb during the daily briefing.
And within this mix, there will be the ammunition required for a genuine push towards equality. Instead of the vagueness of ‘they discriminated against me with microaggressions’ — you hold up the wage PDF and say, look…. this is how much white folks are paid and this is what BIPOC folks are paid.
These figures don’t match… and we’re going to a tribunal to find out why.
You’d have proof, as happened with the BBC, that men are paid disproportionately more than women for doing the same job. Then what happens? Well… people like Samira Ahmed take the BBC to court and win. Men take pay-cuts, women get a pay-rise, or ‘Feminism’ and I’d prefer to call it.
So… here’s the question that needs to be answered. Why hasn’t this happened yet? Why are we spending so much time and energy discussing whether or not TV shows are racially diverse enough instead of focussing on whether or not people in them are fairly paid?
See… in a capitalist society, the only real measurable disadvantage is wealth. Everything else can be mitigated against by redistribution of that wealth into better structures. So why hasn’t it happened?
Could it be that the affluent liberal class don’t want people to know how much they’re paid for their nonsense jobs? They don’t want you to know how much they get for moving paper around in bloated public sector jobs whilst others get minimum wage for work which is twice as hard, emotionally draining and doesn’t come with a holiday to HQ either.
If it were advertised how much modern liberals paid their immigrant cleaners, they might have to foot some of those rising costs? It’s all very well to bang on about unfairness and racism but put your money where your mouth is. Pay people properly and be open about it. Oppression has a much more malevolent twin brother, it’s called ‘exploitation’ — and that’s nothing to do with virtue-signalling and everything to do with wage stagnation.
But what do I know? I’m just a self-employed economic lefty sorting imginary lesbians into 1960s timelines.
Want to know why I’m so down on identity politics? This article should help clarify a few things.
