What’s wrong with performance-based pay?
By William M. Hartnett on May 17, 2007 in featured, newspapers
>The Sun, union start negotiations (Baltimore Sun)
(Via Romenesko)
That’s not a loaded question, I’m honestly clueless when it comes to the issues involved in performance-based pay in a union newsroom. Rewarding productive or innovative journalists more than the just-getting-by crowd seems brilliant on its face, and it’s hardly a revolutionary compensatory concept. Let’s be honest, every office, whether it’s a newsroom or an accounting firm, has its A team and its B, C, D and F teams. Why should the third-stringers be guaranteed any raise at all, much less one equal to the starters?
But, obviously, a lack of clear standards, in the hands of a certain type of manager, leads to arbitrary or otherwise unfair and even discriminatory decisions. Surely there’s some way to make merit pay work fairly. Finding that way, and rewarding performance rather than longevity, seems just as key to our future as any web initiative or niche print product.
(I’d delve deeper into the union’s web site, but most of the articles seem to be unlabeled Word documents and PDFs. One of my pet peeves.)
