One Right Way part 4
As I think about, One Right Way this past week, I kept thinking about salary and compensation as a whole. It amazes me that a bulk of us just accept and tolerate the “right way” of compensation as told to us by business leaders and politicians. Have you ever thought about the way wages and compensation is set up? Have you ever considered how some of today’s management philosophy and compensation is tied to lessons from slavery? Historian Caitlin Rosenthal did and wrote a compelling chapter of the book Slavery’s Capitalism called Slavery’s Scientific Management. Katie Johnson wrote up a review Caitlin’s work and said the following:
Rosenthal, a Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in business history at Harvard Business School, found that southern plantation owners kept complex and meticulous records, measuring the productivity of their slaves and carefully monitoring their profits — often using even more sophisticated methods than manufacturers in the North. Several of the slave owners’ practices, such as incentivizing workers (in this case, to get them to pick more cotton) and depreciating their worth through the years, are widely used in business management today.
As fascinating as her findings were, Rosenthal had some misgivings about their implications. She didn’t want to be perceived as saying something positive about slavery. On the contrary, she sees her research as a critique of capitalism — one that could broaden the understanding of today’s business practices.
When you start to look at the history and the was we have racial and gender wage disparities, how can we just accept compensation philosophy presented to us that has yielded the disparities in the first place? Seriously, how are we to believe if we just do the same thing we will get a different result? For example, we are told that certain salaries are set by the “market”. So in essence, people look at what each other are paying in wages and agree that it sounds right so it must be fair. People legally collude to keep wages low. If you look at the chart at the beginning of this piece, how is that working out for us?
So I come back to the question, how are wages and compensation set up? What makes a CEO worth millions of dollars and the people that work for him not even a tenth of that salary? According to Economic Policy Institute CEOs make 320 times as much as a typical worker. When the factors of determining pay are set by influences of bias and discrimination along with a history that was influenced by slavery, shouldn’t we be compelled to come together to be honest with our history and seek new solutions that truly values everyone?
