"Oh baloney. You pay people what you think they have to be paid not to go to a competitor, and (pass/fail) whether their continued employment is important to the corporation. Full stop.

There are exceptions, like when your wife’s brother has to have an income even though he’s basically useless, or when the zoning commissioner’s wife could be very important to your expansion plans, but absent those (and other) unique situations, somebody who sits around and “determines appropriate compensation levels based on knowledge, problem solving, and accountability” are called Human Resource Managers. I thought we got rid of all of those a dozen or so years ago after realizing that they had no idea how business worked."

I love this. Yes, often those are the determining aspects for doing whatever is necessary to keep folks, take care of relatives, pass out favors and whatever. Unfortunately, over my lifetime I have seen that type of "exceptions".

Over the long run, companies cannot use loose rule sets as it will eventually led to employee issues. The biggest driver of employee dissatisfaction at the Fortune 500 company where I worked was employees perceiving some staff members being treated better than the rest of the employees. It is a quick way to have all sorts of unhappiness in the business and that is why it is orders of magnitude better to have a system that as fairly as possible determines pay via assessment of knowledge, Problem Solving, Accountability, and for production jobs to include measures assessing physical labor aspects and/or other relevant aspects.

There were frequently overlooked "interactions" seen in the 1970s that would result in instant termination today. The stories we old-timers could tell . . . . . . .

Uwharrie