Universal salry - could it ever work?

[manicinsomniac]

This occurred to me as I was reading another thread but I didn't want to derail.

Do you think we could ever live in a society that paid adults for the hours of work they do, not the type of work? So people would be paid by the hour, regardless of what job they were doing, rather than having an annual salary.

For example, people in the UK are to earn £15 per hour. So someone who cleans for 3 hours earns £45 but someone who cleans for 10 hours earns £150 and a doctor who does a 15 hour shift earn £225 while a lawyer who works 6 hours earns £90. People log their hours every day and get paid their sum total of working hours at the end of the week or month.

The incentive to work hard is still there because the more you work the more you get. You would still have people in a full range of jobs because people have different skills, interests, circumstances and degrees of intelligence.

I suppose the issue is - do people ever choose a job based on the money it pays alone and are there any jobs that nobody would do if they weren't as highly paid as they are? I work in a middle salary job (teacher) and didn't consider money when I was deciding what I want to do. I imagine most people choose on what they want or are able to do and are either pleased or resigned about the salary?

Obviously you couldn't do this to current adults. It would have to be phased in for people entering employment for the first time.

Is it crazy? It is, isn't it? There's some huge flaw I'm failing to see.

Having just been to Prague, and learned about communism there, you really wouldn't want it.

Apparently it is more nonsensical, but for reasons that can't be explained in words or arguments. It's just obvious and communism.

physical disability is a good point. But there must be far far more people stuck on minimum wage working all hours than there are people with physical disabilities. But yes, that would require some working around.

And nobody would need to work 80 hour weeks because the hourly rate would be sufficient for a full time job to be the proper definition of full time (I don't know what that is - 45 hours maybe?)

But yes, there would be massive problems with this idea. I'm just not convinced they're worse problems than those we currently have.

How are you going to compensate those who spend years training and racking up debt? Or will uni be free too?

A lot of people research salary before going to uni or I know money centric people

And how are you going to compensate people for the risk? Cleaner does a bad job, usually not the end of the world. Anesthetist does a bad job, and your conscious during an op, and I unable to tell anyone, but can feel everything? Why would I risk the second job?

You seem to be confusing "working hard" with "working longer". No incentive to work more productively if you get paid for the hours you do.

And being a doctor would be nowhere near as stressful to me as having to clean up after them.

Seriously? You'd find it less stressful to do a bit of cleaning than to make the decisions that could end or save a life? You'd find it less stressful to tell a parent that their child has just died than you would find it to sweep the floor?

Can you honestly not work out for yourself the problems that would be associated with this?

Pray God you aren't my child's teacher.

OK, OP. I am a scientist. I really like what I do, perhaps even feel vocational about it.

Who will have paid for my seven years of university education? If I'm not going to earn any more than a cleaner, presumably I can't be expected to fund it myself?

How will you track my hours? Most of my job is thinking, and I think about work stuff a lot. Can I claim for the hour I spend in the bath at night? And my train journeys?

How will you change my career structure such that I would, for no more money than a cleaner earns, willingly go through the continued stress of acquiring funding, the insecurity of short term contracts, the pressure to perform perform perform? Why would I do that? I mean, I like science, but I don't like how science careers work. Where is my incentive to not take the easy route?

As for the social status conferred by a PhD? Sure, it's there. But is it worth it in itself? No.

Currently, we don't reward most of the less academic people financially. Yet they often work just as hard or harder.

Very often, they don't. People work harder in general when the rewards are higher. It's as simple as that.

Oh, given the top small % pay the majority of the tax, what would happen to tax revenue and f we all earnt £524515 a year 35kish

My job is fairly well paid...well, not mega bucks but above average.

Part of the reason for this is it requires additional training - and no, the training is not fun, exciting or rewarding for anything other than career progression. You wouldn't do it because you found it interesting.

It also has very stressful moments where, truth be told, if I could say fuck it and work in a shop (for example) for the same wage, I would, and I suspect 99 percent of other people would too.

I might not work harder than someone working in a shop, but I have more responsibility than someone working in a shop.

Also, how would innovation suffer?

Why should I think up cures for cancer if I can earn the same doing lab monkey jobs?

redsky - that's true. There'd have to be very stringent management and appraisal to ensure people were being productive I suppose.

You picked on the most stressful parts of being a doctor Osolea and didn't mention the stimulation, reward and challenge. Saving lives on a regular basis and telling a parent that their child has gone into remission, for example. Cleaning would have none of those peaks and troughs. For most people, it's monotony. For me, yes, massive stress. I can't explain it, dirt, filth and other people's food/fluids/general life waste make me heave. For others cleaning is a joy and very satisfying.

Absolutely not - my job share and I regularly lament that we regret becoming managers for the stress it causes and if we were paid the same salary as we are now would drop back to doing the work of the team we manage.

lots of people work harder/do challenging jobs in order that they can work fewer hours, with a better work/life balance, and still reasonable money. Who wants to work 20 hour days, just to be able to earn more?!

Not to mention that there's no reason to work harder in that time - more reason to stretch the work out, do as little as possible, so that you still get paid by the time but have to do very little (a bit like some public sector jobs can get quite inefficient after a while).

The prospect of earning more is one factor that allows innovation and invention, too, which benefit us all in the end.

Why would people put up with the stress and paperwork that some jobs entail, when they could do a different job which was totally stress-free for the same money?

Bonkers idea for reasons already given, but basing it on hours worked rather than quality of work wouldn't be an incentive to work efficiently.
It would be like the bad old days of IT when coders were paid for the number of lines they wrote and the number of bugs they fixed: promoting inefficient/faulty coding rather than well designed, 'works first time' code...

And being a doctor would be nowhere near as stressful to me as having to clean up after them.

That might be the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Do you have any idea how stressful and difficult being a doctor is? How hard you have to work just to get there let alone do the job? The gravity of the responsibility? Christ

Communism, as nice and fluffy and friendly as it sounds, does not work.

But venture capitalists facilitate business start ups by providing funding and therefore shoulder a lot of risk. The difference between high paid jobs is that most of these are huge income generators either for the individual or the organisation whereas jobs such as cleaning nursing and retail jobs are service provision and don't have the same sort of income generation capacity like multi billion £ hedge fund deals

I did address the 'why bother' issue in my OP:

I suppose the issue is - do people ever choose a job based on the money it pays alone and are there any jobs that nobody would do if they weren't as highly paid as they are? I work in a middle salary job (teacher) and didn't consider money when I was deciding what I want to do. I imagine most people choose on what they want or are able to do and are either pleased or resigned about the salary?

My assumption was that it was far more common to work for work rather than work for money. Looks like that is not the case though so, fair enough, IABU.

OP, this makes no sense. In fact, when I clicked on it, I thought you were probably talking about a "universal payment" like this one
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/01/paying-everyone-a-basic-income-would-kill-off-low-paid-menial-jobs

but back to what you are talking about - I pulled back from stressful work - higher paid - even though it was higher paid, because I couldn't cope and I hated it.

How on earth would you get someone into a more stressful job - however you define that - if they were being paid the same as for the less stressful one? Yes, some people will find the jobs with more power more attractive and just enjoy that type of challenge - but in general, the chaos that would ensue out of paying someone the same - I can't see how that could be avoided. if work wanted to promote me now, I'd take on some extra duties for extra pay. But without extra pay, why would I bother?

And what if you spent 7 years not earning because you were studying medicine? If you went into the profession on the same salary as everyone else, could you afford it even if you wanted to do it? You would have lost 7 years of earning - so right off the bat, an 18 year old interested in being a doctor would be better off doing something else.

You would be introducing a different kind of hierarchy where people who couldn't or don't want to work long hours will be penalised - basically the disabled, the elderly and women. Talk about survival of the fittest. Young, unencumbered, healthy people who can work long hours get the most. Skills and experience counting for nothing.

another thought - if we were all paid by the hour then where there was overtime available, wouldn't people start working more slowly?

My DH is a milkman working 6 nights pw (11pm to 5am) in all weather.

Why would ANYONE do that job for the same money as a cleaner for example?

My DH started his own business up several years ago. This means long hours, 4.30am starts sometimes, working most evenings and checking e-mails even when we are supposed to be on holiday. Financially, it was worth it and he enjoys being his own boss. However, would he/we go through that again if he wouldn't earn any more than his employees? Fuck no.
And don't get me started on my career. University, postgraduate degree and further post graduate exams. I love many aspects of my job, but had a really tricky time when my DC were younger and would not have stuck to it if the financial incentive hadn't been there. I don't do my job just for the money, but it is a very pleasant cherry on top.

If we were living in a society that paid everyone in this way - do you really think that same society would be charging for university study? The ideologies are at complete odds. It's not like Britain would implement this overnight and still be expecting students to cough up 9k a year.