Economists usually sneer at attempts to tie appropriate wages to positions based on an artificial scale of value. Wages, according to economics, should reflect conditions of demand and supply. The sort of scale constructed in schemes such as:

1) Might capture something of what is important in the demand for labor services, but it misses the supply side.

2) Potentially come closer to impounding both demand and supply factors, but they still miss the impact of factors omitted from the job analyses.

Suppose, for instance, that this sort of analysis led to the conclusion that driving trucks and typing manuscripts are equally \”valuable\” and so should command the same pay. What if, for some inexplicable reason, driving trucks is more fun, holding pay equal, so no one wants (at these equal wages) to type reports?! What should someone with a report that needs to be typed do? Economists presume that the answer is pay more to get the report typed, an answer so compelling to the person needing typing services that more pay will inevitably be offered. Or suppose, in a full-service law partnership, legal assistants are paid uniformly. A partner who defends common criminals and whose assistant spends much of his time going to and from the county jail will have a harder time finding a competent assistant than will the partner who represents movie stars in contract negotiations, and whose assistant spends time hobnobbing with the clients. Economists presume that the first partner will find some way to increase the compensation of her assistant, to compensate for the relatively less desirable job characteristics. In other words, the economist\’s religious belief in market forces leads him to the view that if points are used to value and thus price jobs, the prices so derived will survive only to the extent that they are close to market prices. Otherwise, market forces will take over and push them to where they ought to be.

Is the stereotypical economist\’s belief in market forces justified? The answer is something of a tautology. If competition in the labor market is strong – if workers are highly mobile and informed, and if neither side of the market acts collectively or collides – any attempt to use a point system or something similar will be eaten away by market forces, to the extent (that the point system doesn\’t result in wages that match market conditions. But the condition if competition in the labor market is strong is not there just for show. Jobs are rarely identical. When an employee\’s tenure with the employer increases, more and more relation – specific assets tend to build up, weakening further the force of competition in dictating wages. You might choose your brand of toothpaste to save a few cents (and, if you don\’t, someone on the margin will), but it is much less likely that someone would choose one employer over another on account of a few extra Euros a week in compensation. And changing an employer based on such minor differences is less likely still. To the extent that labor markets aren\’t perfectly competitive, procedural and distributive justice in salary-wage administration become important for promoting good relations in the workplace, and a type system, with its gloss of objectivity, can promote feelings of justice. Indeed, the effect might well be circular: To the extent that employees value equity, an administered wage system that promotes feelings of equity on that account may be better protected from market forces.

Point type systems can have a dark side in terms of perpetuating discrimination: Job characteristics can be chosen in ways that replicate a pattern of discrimination in the local market. For instance, jobs may be categorized as clerical versus administrative, or as indoor versus outdoor, in ways that match patterns of discrimination by gender. If local labor market wages reflect gender discrimination, estimates of the \”value\” of these characteristics based on regression analysis will support the notion that (to take the obvious cases) administrative jobs should be paid more than clerical jobs, and outdoor work paid more than indoor work. Furthermore, evidence indicates that organizations are more likely to create unique job titles for white males, whereas women and people of color are more likely to be grouped into larger, less-specialized job categories. Some scholars have argued that this has the effect of tending to insulate white males more from market comparisons, because their job classifications are more idiosyncratic and thus harder to peg to the external labor market. Moreover, some studies have shown that when market wage data are gathered for a subset of benchmark jobs and then used to determine the relative wages among the remaining jobs within an organization, the pay of female-dominated job titles tends to be pegged to the pay of the female dominated benchmarks, perpetuating discrimination. And critics have argued that past inequalities are perpetuated by the common practice of conducting separate job evaluation and benchmarking studies within different occupational groups for instance, separate studies for blue-collar versus white-collar clerical positions, or for managerial versus non-managerial jobs, rather than a single study that embraces the full range of positions within the organization. The claim is that by conducting studies that only compare, say, managerial (or blue-collar) jobs to other jobs in that same occupational family, inequities associated with privileged treatment of one group such as managers or skilled blue-collar workers, who tend to be male-may be masked.

Believing that jobs dominated by women tend to be systematically devalued in organizations and that women have limited opportunities to redress this inequity by shifting to male-dominated jobs, some feminists advocate a policy of comparable worth, whereby employers are required to calibrate the worth of jobs according to objective standards and ensure that gender (or race) composition has no direct bearing on pay. Opposition to such a policy comes, predictably, from those who believe that such a large-scale system of legislatively mandated and administered wages would introduce large-scale and irremediable imbalances between supply and demand, and that no matter how noble the intent, this cure would do more social and economic harm than good. In addition, some feminists who support the intent oppose the particular solution, worrying that – given the discriminatory features of job evaluation and wage benchmarking systems summarized above – comparable worth might simply institutionalize and justify inequitable treatment of female – dominated jobs or reduce the incentive for young women to enter occupations previously dominated by men.

http://www.arturvictoria.info/
http://sites.google.com/site/cliptheschoolbeginning/
http://sites.google.com/site/arturvictoriasite
http://adesg-europa.blogspot.com/

http://www.arturvictoria.info/
http://sites.google.com/site/cliptheschoolbeginning/
http://sites.google.com/site/arturvictoriasite
http://adesg-europa.blogspot.com/

Author Bio: http://www.arturvictoria.info/
http://sites.google.com/site/cliptheschoolbeginning/
http://sites.google.com/site/arturvictoriasite
http://adesg-europa.blogspot.com/

Category: Business Management
Keywords: Organization, behavior, human, information, career, responsible, planning, human resources, leader,