Reddit post in r/conservative by u/concerned-antocommie: “ I think my boss might be a communist. So a while ago, I got my first paycheck at my new job at a fast food place. I guess it wasn't too bad, but I did the math and figured out that I sold a lot more food per hour than I got paid for, even when you account for the price of the food. When I tried to talk to him about it, he said we're all part of one big team, but some people get paid more than others. This is suspiciously close to the famous
"some are more equal than others" from my favorite book, Animal Farm and is what really got me thinking about this. We make the money, and then he takes it and gives it to someone else who doesn't even work!
I'm no economist, but this is textbook socialism. I think I've come to the conclusion that the best way for me to combat these socialist business practices would be teaming up with my fellow workers unify out power and demonstrate that we understand the full value of our labor. Anyone else have similar experiences with obviously Marxist bosses before, or any other advice?”
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[–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

I can see a counter-argument that it would create an incencitive to spend more time where it could be cut down and, also, wiring worker's paychecks to a sometimes arbitrary and flowing value. Like, you don't need to clean the outdoors property every day, it depends on the weather, and there I can see paying a stable wage reserving person's time and paying for it in case I need to call them even if it's sunny and they don't actually need to go. As long as they do their job well, who cares. They or a company can reinvest in better tools making their actual worktime even shorter or more comfortable, like, jumping from a manual gardening tools to an automated lawnmower, while not punishing them for working less. Some kinds of labor doesn't even necessitate being on site, as it was shown by covid, and we see a lot of ideas to cut down on wages due to LLM assistance.

I'm also puzzled about how uneven my work from day to day, and I'd probably prefer to give up on measuring and comparing that at all, defaulting to some lively wage and pulling enough of myself to keep the business afloat. If the idea of a guy over us is in having similar stakes in the business and collectively voting for changes, I see it's possible to set a fair compensation and keep people interested in the end results.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I am also thinking about this in terms of reserving people's time. If people decide to take longer to do stuff there's little you can do to counter that without going down the arduous path of performance metrics, monitoring and evaluations. People can tweak their productivity over 955 regular working schedules where tasks just take longer and project comoletion times stretch further. They just take more free time within the regular schedule. So I suggest time-proportional pay only under the condition where we decide to let some people reserve more of their time to this activity of doing work. But perhaps we don't want that as there are other side effects too.

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