Workers' financial participation: East-West experiences [antikvár]

PrefaceA pay system may be defined as the various procedures and rules established within an enterprise to determine the basic entitlements of workers to different elements of remuneration. The term pay administration encompasses the design of such a system, its application and its adjustment to changing circumstances, in the light of the enteiprise's goals and of its assumptions as to how these goals can be advanced through the pay system. Payments by results have been defined as a pay system under which money rewards vary with measured changes in performance according to predetermined rules.' This book focuses on pay systems which emphasize what is termed "financial participation by employees". Financial participation refers to pay schemes which provide workers, in addition to fixed pay, with a variable portion of remuneration directly linked to some measure of enterprise performance. In practice, these refer mainly to gain-sharing, profit-sharing and employee share-ownership schemes, although the book also refers to related schemes for linking pay to performance.A few points should be made at the outset. First, the emphasis on financial participation schemes should not lead the reader to conclude either that there is a great general proliferation of these schemes or that they are pursued exclusively in any pay administration approach. Pay systems typically tend to be the results of a varied combination of formal and/or informal negotiation and compromise, technical expertise and the extension of trends established by other enterprises. Enterprises consequently tend to exploit a variety of pay administration techniques for establishing and differentiating base pay rates, allowances and bonuses - some of which are linked to individual and/or group performance indicators - and other elements of indirect remuneration that may be legally required, employer initiated or collectively bargained. Recourse to a financial participation scheme tends typically to form only part of this total configuradon. Furthermore, on the whole, despite cyclical experiments with different types of pay systems, it is probably fair to assert that most workers everywhere condnue to receive the vast majority of their pay according to traditional time-based pay systems with discretionary adjustments based on more or less subjective evaluations of merit by supervisors, supplemented by a variety of allowances that are not closely linked to any predetermined performance standards.The second point that should be made is that experiments with financial participadon, as part of a broader attempt to render enterprise labour costs more flexible and to promote increased productivity and more harmonious labour' ILO: Payment by results (Geneva, 1984), p. I.