Ask Lemmy

TL;DR Impossible, you can't just split all the money among the employees.

If you want to be fair in this you need to include all the expenses any business has and also reduce that by some multiple, no business can spend all it makes and survive for long.

Businesses have the same risks and problems as people do, with ironically, additional problems and risks brought on by the people themselves, such as embezzlement and theft.

You have to include or calculate for holding back profits to stay in the bank to get the company through a recession, natural disasters, or unforeseen circumstances on the downside, or to buy new production facilities and equipment on the upside.

There is almost always debt service on real estate or existing equipment.

There are lots of costs any business has and must provide for such as defending against frivolous lawsuits, patent trolls, and grifters, as well as the usual ones such as advertising, complying with government regulations, taxes.

For retail and manufacturing, supplies and enough inventory takes up a lot of capital and also financing to make it work.

and it seems easier to focus on what other groups pay for those skills, which is not what I want.

The problem is that the skills have different worth and that said worth is different given the skill set. This isn't what you want to hear, but cost to replace is a good metric for this. This includes the quality of the work.

Personally, I'd start at the minimum required to live in the immediate area around the job site and go up from there based on merit/difficulty of the task/importance of task. But then again, I'm not a business person.

I think market based mechanisms for calculating pay would be very hard to get away from.

That said, Mondragon (worker cooperative) has a base pay rate and then all positions are assigned a multiplier to determine an individual's compensation.

At my company management pay is a fraction of the hourly cost of employees for standard time and materials work.