Marx my words!
Aristotle said: “The difference between an upright person and a dishonest person is that the former can say what he is talking about”. So let’s be frank.
[Translators’ note: this posting is difficult to express in English. The German word “Leistung” means “achievement” or “performance”, but also “effort”. I have translated it as “effort”, because otherwise the posting makes no sense. In fact the posting is based on the confusion between effort and achievement].
“Effort must be rewarded again”; “equal pay for equal work”; “we are an effort society”! All these are proverbs, statements and sayings which fog our thinking, are no longer accurate and lead to outrageous prejudices and demands. Also, they are highly dishonest.
I do not want to be paid for my efforts, I do not want equal money for equal work, and I do not want my effort to be rewarded!
It has been a long time since we really wanted to be paid for what it actually is we are paid for. I am afraid this will ruin our state, the well-being of our population, and the enterprises. There is only one reason for this: we have become dishonest in the Aristotelian sense. We no longer know the meaning of important phrases in our society. We associate certain emotions with certain words and those dominate our behaviour.
Let me illustrate this with the term “effort principle”. We all know the effort principle; it is a pillar of our economy. At the same time, the effort principle ruins our economy. I admit to vehemently opposing the effort principle. Before you get excited, let me explain.
The effort principle is a method of honouring the employee’s efforts by paying him according to his effort. Effort is either the extent to which set goals have been reached or the quantity of work done in a certain amount of time. So far, so good!
Let us see if this is what our payment system is based on. What is it we get our pay-check, our income, or our percentages of profit for? In former times, it was quite simple: if you wanted to work, you offered your labour on the labour market. Work had its market value in relation to others who offered it as well. Then there were bosses who bought this labour on the labour market. The reason why they did that was that they believed the acquired labour would be useful for them. Thus, labour gained a utility value. As soon as the utility value increased, the worker got more pay, because he wanted a share in the increased value. If the utility value decreased, the boss did not want the labour any more and the labourer was made redundant. The principle was that of market value – utility value. Today, the expected utility value is still the determining factor when the income is calculated!
But how has the effort principle found its way into our brains? Well, there was someone who found the market-value principle inhuman. He thought it was a disgrace to measure human labour by comparing it with other labour and by its usefulness. In terms of dignity, all labour is equal. He thought human labour should not be treated like a sales article. Moreover, he thought this basis for payment was unjust, because it was not the actual endeavour, toil and effort of the employee that was paid for but rather The Work, which got its value not inherently, but rather by comparing it with another type of work.
So this man looked around and found what he had been looking for in Prussian schools. There, students were not graded according to their usefulness, but according to their actual effort. It was irrelevant if the father of a student was an important person in the community, who, for instance, being a butcher donated half a pig to the teacher.
By declaration this man transferred that same principle to the economy. By the way, the man who discovered the effort principle was Karl Marx!
After World-War-II, the Allied Forces saved the western part of Germany from becoming a communist country. Nevertheless, in those days the effort principle paid an important role. It became synonymous for the gigantic economical post-war boom.
When I tell this story to bosses, they mostly want to save their effort principle. Again and again, I hear three counter-arguments. Let me discuss them now:
“If I say effort principle, what I mean is market value – utility value”.
This argument is unacceptable, especially since the definition of effort principle is widely accepted. Please keep in mind that the effort principle is an ideal typical socialist principle of payment, where market and utility do not feature at all!
Moreover, the argument is not honest, because if someone uses a term in a way he does not mean, then he is lying. Confucius said: the loss of important definitions is the loss of freedom for a society! We are well under way towards loosing our freedom.
Effort and utility have little in common. There are people who are useful to their boss simply without effort. Just think of the Peter Principle (people will rise until they get to the point where they can no longer cope). In advertising, we often have the situation that creative people toil very little, but are still enormously useful.
Compared with small efforts, great efforts are poorly paid. According to the effort principle, an unskilled labourer who manages to finish 130 per cent of his pre-defined quota would have to be paid better than a manager or boss who only does 100 per cent of his work.
“If the work is similar, then the effort principle should be applied”
Even an employee who is doing piece-work or external duty does not get his pay according to the effort principle. For instance, if a labourer produces 10 light bulbs in an hour, the boss still can only pay him the money he gets for them on the market. If the price for light bulbs plummets, the labourer either has to produce more light bulbs per hour or be satisfied with less money, even though he has worked more!
If you say you pay according to effort, you are talking in riddles, because the term “pay according to effort” pulls the wool over the real reason for your income: its usefulness! For a salesman, it is irrelevant if he has visited 50 clients. All he has to show is finished deals. For instance, in the insurance business, a life insurance is worth more than a house insurance. It is totally irrelevant how much effort the insurance salesman has put into the sale. His payment is measured by the value of the insurance he has sold.
“The effort principle guarantees social peace”
How to explain to a labourer that he deserves less than a white-collar worker? How to explain to a man working in front of a furnace that a soccer star works harder than he? I think there is no way to explain it. The man working in front of a furnace works far harder than the soccer player! But who cares? Should we build arenas around an industrial furnace, install TV cameras and send it at prime time on pay-tv? It is more fun to watch the soccer players during the European Championships. Tickets for a first-row seat in front of the industrial furnace will probably be hard to sell.
If I have to explain the principle of usefulness, then the labourer will easily see that about 70% of his usefulness is directly or indirectly going back to him in the form of his pay-check. Conversely, the white-collar worker or managing director will only find a maximum of around 30% of the usefulness he causes on his bank account as income.
Another example is the dispute about how the income in East Germany should be brought to the same level as in West Germany. There is no doubt that in East Germany people work as hard as in West Germany. But there the bosses were forced to pay more than the work brought in.
The effort principle does not guarantee social peace. Rather, it is a threat to social peace! Nowadays, the idea of the effort principle has climaxed in the grotesque concept that we think people have to be paid for simply being present in the firm. We want to get paid for time, not work.
Let me finish with a sentence by George Bernard Shaw: the only things people are prepared to die for are those sufficiently incomprehensible to them. A good day to you all!
UDP
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