Reference no: EM132770365
Question
Suppose you start up a business, and you want to pay all your employees in a fair way. How do you determine what is a fair compensation for their work? Explain your answer. The reason this is important is that many people accuse 'liberals' of wanting to "redistribute" income that was fairly distributed in the first place, and that this is unfair to those who earn more money. But how do we know that the people, such as bosses or stockholders, who earn more money are earning it fairly rather than taking advantage of their employees by paying them less than they should? What is a fair way to determine earnings (in a company you fully own and manage)? And since this is your company and we are talking about our current capitalist economic system, not socialism or communism, you can set up the pay anyway you want that is legal, which currently gives you fairly large latitude. So the question is if you want to be fair to everyone who works for you, and you also want to be fair to yourself, what criteria would you set up for everyone's pay, including yourself?, And don't say you will pay the same wages as other companies in the area or the usual wage for the industry, unless you can prove the standard rate in either case is actually fair, since if everyone else is paying unfair wages, copying their pay criteria will not make your pay fair, just comparable.
And don't give the most common standard answer saying you will base your employees' pay on their education and experience because then you would have paid Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, and Vivien Thomas next to nothing. Thomas in particular since he only had a high school diploma and no college, but he invented open heart surgery and became an instructor of cardiac surgery at Johns Hopkins University where he taught some of the most renowned future cardiac surgeons. Schooling and experience don't particularly equate to what you need in an employee, and many a person who claims 20 years of experience really only has one year of experience twenty times.