So, what is "fair", who decides? Serious question.
I know how big companies decide, since I worked for several as a senior executive and sat in on compensation meetings. They hire professional compensation companies to develop these complex rating systems that use a range of variables to determine a competitive compensation. I hated them, because they were based on objective criteria but not actual productive criteria. So, two people with the same education, years of service, doing the same job got put in the same compensation box even if one was twice as productive as the other. Why... to avoid lawsuits.
The same companies hire these compensation companies to review everyone's "pay" to make sure the company would not lose a lawsuit based on race, gender, or any other protected class criteria based on compensation.
PayScale is one of these companies and with over 500,000 employees in their data base the total average pay difference between the lowest paid black women and highest paid Asian women is 2% on average. White men sit right between those two groups and the fact that a minority class of women are at the top argues there is some other factor than skin color or race driving the difference. And when this company completes its review, it makes recommendations to close even this small gap.
So, for the most part in major corporations the people making the compensation determination for most workers don't even work for the company. It may seem that way, but if you ever been through the experience where your manager says "I have to check with corporate" when you ask for more money... they are putting you into the grid and seeing where you stand. "Corporate" isn't a greedy person... it is a machine calculated grid.
But companies have different compensation strategies. You might be glad to know, that once I become CEO, I tended to overpay front line service workers relative to my competition, but I also fired the bad ones. My theory was to overpay the people that were the "face" of the company.
I wanted to make sure they stayed. But if you are going to overpay relative to other companies, you have to have better front-line workers. Overpaying for average is not a good business strategy.
One thing I like about Donald Trump is he understands that if we are going to pay workers more, we need to protect companies and employees from having the work or their jobs shipped overseas. I am okay with paying more so workers can earn more, but if paying workers more, means the company goes broke and the jobs go overseas, then what is the point. You may to be young to remember the "Buy American" campaign the Unions orchestrated to try to keep high paying union jobs from being lost to foreign companies... it failed... not because of "greedy" corporations, but because consumers like "cheap". Do you check the labels to determine where a product is made before buying it? Curious because I do, but I am affluent and can afford to "Buy American" if it means the jobs stay in America.
Compensation is a global market. We need to stop pitting workers with management and work together to compete against foreign companies and in some cases, I even support tariffs if necessary to help American workers, since if the foreign product is just as good and cheaper, the American worker is doomed.
