Mfers will literally do anything to avoid reading Marx.

If the company fails, the responsibility for that is not on the workers. Why would they care if it does, if they can just extract all of the money for themselves?

The responsibility for managing the company should be on the people that are responsible for the company itself.

This is not to say, that they should not be represented in decisionmaking, they probably should, but since they do not own the organisations that employ them, they have no right to dictate how they should be run.

That sounds very much like what unions do in Australia, kind of.

Workers negotiate pay as a collective.

The very premise of this assumes that everyone is aware of what everyone else’s job is including all of their responsibilities, that they can objectively judge how well they do their job, that they will not base their decisions based on personal or identity biases (particularly against protected classes), that they have an understanding or even basic knowledge of company budget and financials, and that they can be trusted to properly weigh the financial health of the company with the relatively value each individual’s contributions and the desire for one’s own personal gain.

I would argue that almost no person in an company bigger than 10 people is capable of most (if any) of these. Not that existing company structures are always great at all of these, nor are they usually incentivized to pay people their true worth, but the system you proposed would likely lead to massive issues in any company. Financial issues, personal issues, etc. Even if a company like this were to survive, you would likely see rampant turnover for women, minorities, young people, and anyone else that is likely to be under paid by the might of the majority that believes they are worth less than their white male seniors. Likewise, the “nice” guy manager that does do his job in the slightest but is fun to hang out with is more likely to get a raise than the serious managers who actually keep the company working and on profitable endeavors, which is likely to lose everyone their jobs when the company is no longer profitable. There are more problems with this, but that should be enough to see the pitfalls here.

The biggest problem I see is that people don’t always understand others’ jobs and how to judge if they are doing them well. I know this will be unpopular but managers are the key example here. Everyone thinks they know who the good and bad managers are but until you’ve been one, you dont understand their job to truly know more than who you like and who you don’t like. That’s no way to decide anyone’s pay.

I agree that this a colossally stupid idea.

However, it has the virtue of not being every other word I read online. For the novelty of it, I thank you.

Holy shit any company I’ve worked at has been political enough. This would be absurdly detrimental to mental health…

While in concept I agree. I would rather see a wage tier approach where the lowest paid employee can never be less than say 10% of the CEO (total compensation) then managesr say 40% (managers make no more that 2.5x the lowest) and executives 25%. Something like that.

I would love that ensrined in law. Maybe not those numbers but fuck it, make it a party platform and set it at the government level. And don’t give the CEO’s some kind of consulting loophole.

I say this as someone that makes a well above average wage.

One thing you will eventually find out is there is a good portion of the company who thinks they are an effective employee when they really aren’t. For example I work in Software and Hardware development. In 25 years I’ve worked in large companies and small, big teams, small teams and teams of one. I’ve had many project managers and in almost all cases they have ranged from bad to pointless. The well oiled teams found the project managers only got in the way and provided no ROI to their work. So much so that in one org the PM left and they never replaced them which resulted in the teams highest productive quarters two years running.

If we were to vote I’d ask for justification for those roles and what their returns are. What actual added benefit did they bring and what problems did they cause. The issue i foresee is that every single one of them would say they were very valuable and important. But if you asked the people under them doing the actual development you’d hear the exact opposite. With the pandemic and everyone working remotely you’d think their role would become even more important but a lot of places have shown that haven’t.

You should look into how co-ops function, since those are basically democratic.

You might want to edit the title to include the actual question.

but as for the question itself… Ahm. just on a pragmatic side… “the rest of the company…” might be something that could be reasonably done on a small company (less than a 250 people. Probably less than 50 people, actually,) but in any large company, you may as well send out a poll asking what kind of soup they prefer- Chicken or Pea Soup- and which ever manager backing the losing soup gets the axe.

The only people who might be aware of how hard any given person works are going to be the team members alongside them and the direct reports above and below them.

And to be perfectly blunt, working hard doesn’t necessarily translate to work getting done. if the manager is just spinning their wheels and not getting the core stuff done, it’s a problem. If the manager is spending too much time on things that simply don’t matter… it’s a problem.

Ultimately, even if you can have a reasonable belief that every one knows what every one else does and doesn’t do (that sounds like hell, actually.) it turns into a popularity contest and the manager whose actually keeping things running might not get recognized by it, where the manager throwing parties and blowing cash does. One might say I’m being a stick in the mud, but the reality is, if the managers stop facilitating the work their people do… then the company fails. No parties. no jobs. no company.

The problem with most companies is that they are not led by people with clear visions.

Companies that succeed typically start with a clear vision. However, once that vision is fulfilled, then it starts to become run by people who are simply trying to make money.

Chasing after money becomes the vision, and that is how you get to the way things are in America today.

Having a vision often times means having goals that you’re willing to lose money if it gets you closer to achieving them.

That being said, ratuer than voting for your paycheck, something that is much more straightforward and less prone to being taken advantage of would be having set wages based on years of experience and time with the company.

include an opportunity to earn extra during the year by going above and beyond while making it clear that this is not expected of the people at their current job role.

Going above and beyond would be determined by your boss on recommendation, and they would have a limited number of recommendations every year.

Another thing you could do would be to publish what everybody earns on a website that is internal to the company, and make the going above and beyond rewards part of your annual meeting or something so nobody would know if they’re going to get an above and beyond reward until then.

Then to actually make it a good thing, you would need to make it a rule to fire the people that do not meet their performance metrics, at least after a set number of times or like failing to fulfill a pip or something.

If you want a more egalitarian workplace I’m afraid the only solution is to remove the capitalists siphoning off the surplus value created by the labor of the workers. Co-ops are one way to do this on the small scale, but especially in the US they will have a hard time competing with giant corporations which is why they aren’t common anymore: they’ve largely been driven out of most markets by much larger entities.