Should a cleaner be paid the same as a CEO?

TL;DR answer: Not the same, but not such a sharp difference.


Long answer:


I would make payment relate to the value brought to the company or organisation in terms of the actions done by the person which bring profitability and sustainability to the organisation, with a salary cap of maximum 10x salary difference, or some other such arbitrary metric. 


So for example, a person who lays bricks is the person who actually makes the house. The man driving the "bakkie" (pickup truck) merely watches him and brokers his labour. That is not entirely valueless, because without the labour broker who gives the builder "credibility" in the eyes of the probably racist customers, the bricklayer would not have work at all. But the labour broker certainly does not deserve MORE money than the bricklayer. At worst, they should split the profit equally. My dad had this policy. He was a labour broker for a welder. He gave the welder most of the profit since the welder did the work. My dad merely did the sales.


For me, a salary is a measure of a person's "worth" at the moment, that is, a measure of their perceived worth. Since, as we use the phrase, saying that some people are "worth" more than others for me is fundamentally offensive in the sense of our constitutional declaration of human equality. As a principle, I find the notion of sharply differentiated pay to be morally horrible.


In my view, there are two types of work - that which can be measured in value, and that which cannot. For example, I can measure my work's value in terms of facilitation. I facilitate the operations of IT, apart from doing some admin work myself, and therefore I enable peoples' ability to find work. Without my work, none of them could function. Therefore in my view, my job is extremely important and is worth can be assumed to be a sum of the value of the work of all the others who rely on mine, minus what I charge for theirs.


In covid-19, all these disrespected people, such as cleaners, went from being non-essential to essential. Suddenly their work was appreciated. Therefore I do indeed appreciate the value of a cleaner's work. In covid-19, people deploying sanitiser are literally saving lives and therefore their work is of almost infinite value. OF course, you can argue that literally anyone could do that job. That's not my point.


My point is, measuring a person's work's "value" is not a trivial task. It cannot be arbitrarily pegged at minimum wage level. And therefore, just ASSUMING that a CEO is more valuable than the engineer who makes the product itself, is completely incorrect. I would place a CEO's salary below an engineer's salary.


Measurable work is that work which has visible tangible impact. Immeasurable work is work which has no visible tangible impact. An example of the former is a human resources officer who ensures that people get paid. An example of the latter is an artist. Intangibles are only measurable in terms of supply and demand. Their customers have to set the value of their work. An argument is often made by artists that they spent years practicing a skill to get that good etc. I disagree. Like with a civil servant, who works out of duty when his skills could be better paid elsewhere, an artist creates because it is in his nature, his genome, to create. He could not but be an artist. Therefore asking to be paid for just-what-he-is is in my view weird.


In my view, all persons who contribute to the functioning of a company must

a) receive shares equal to their proportional contribution to the company's functioning, with those who are indispensible receiving the most shares

b) salaries should be capped, not just minimised/have a minimum set


The utter malaise of capitalism is simply that it assumes that "low value" work must be underpaid. By using this assumption, capitalism ensures the perpetuation of poverty cycles. By paying a cleaner R 4000 a month ($285) you ensure that her children cannot go to a middle-class school and therefore will most probably not get a good education and threfore themselves will probably end up being menial workers, earning R4000 per month again. By giving a cleaner a living wage which enables her to break out of the cycle of poverty, you will in fact CREATE a future generation of consumers and skilled persons, instead of actively destroying people's lives for generations to come.


In my observation, certainly, there is bidding and incentivisation of excessive salaries to incentivise people to take roles if they have special talents. HOWEVER, my question is whether there is due proportion.  Furthermore, it is my observation that in places with skills shortages, such as South Africa, people put excessive premia on their "supposed" value. When prices go up, etc., what happens is those who are paid excessively REDUCE the wages of manual laborers (due to glut), and INCREASE their wages to absorb the price increases, thereby penalising and perpetuating the poverty cycle. This is why, for example, we have our Gini Coefficient that we do. That's why we're sitting on an in-practice 45% unemployment level.


Whilst one can argue that CEOs are taking risk, because they're shareholders or founders etc., that's not a good reason to argue that they should take the lion's share. The workers who create the product must take the lion's share. 


Lower-level workers in a firm, furthermore, do not care about the firm because they do not have shares. They have no psychological investment. In terms of taking risk, everyone is taking risk. The firm could go under any second. It could be mismanaged by a corrupt person who takes a much bigger salary than he ought to. The workers could lose their jobs. Give the workers shares and they will care about the firm and therefore partake in its risk and work harder to make it succeed. You will get loyalty that way.


Regarding the idea that people can break out of poverty by their bootstraps, which is the capitalist assumption, I think it is wrong.  I think that it requires a lot of factors to "break out" of the poverty cycle and they are all deterministic in origin. For example, A shepherd in the sahel cannot become an astronaut because he has never heard of one.

 Breaking the cylce of poverty with government policy and opportunity creation will make shepherds hear of astronauts. You won't get a CEO from a random rural child unless some accident provides that child with the opportunities needed to inform the lifecycle of a CEO, e.g. that she accidentally meets someone, or goes somewhere, where there are lots of books, she accidentally gets the opportunity to learn English, etc.


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