Question

1. An important issue in compensation is the gender-wage gap. It is illegal to pay men and women differently for doing the same work. As you think about these chapters and the gender-wage gap, address two of these issues: using complete sentences.

---Pay secrecy policies may perpetuate the gender-wage gap, if women don’t realize they are underpaid (as in the Lilly Ledbetter case). What do you think of pay secrecy vs. pay openness policies?

---Comparable worth is the idea that men’s work and women’s work should be paid the same if the skill, effort, and responsibility are comparable, even if the jobs are different. What do you think of comparable worth?

---Women typically negotiate less for pay than men do, and as a result, women often have lower salaries than men. And when women do negotiate strongly, they are viewed more negatively. Is the common practice of pay negotiation fair or not? What if the job doesn’t require negotiating skills?

2. One of the always controversial issues is the ethicality of pay that top management (especially CEOs) receives. Take a look at the information on the AFL-CIO executive paywatch website. Then answer two of these questions using complete sentences.

--What are some amounts that CEOs are making, and what is the most lucrative form? How does their pay correspond to the health of their companies?

--The paywatch site shoes how much a CEO makes compared to the average employee. In other countries, this ratio is much lower. Can we justify such high ratios for our CEOs?

--Too often, executives are focused on short term metrics, such as quarterly reports. So executives may get pay in the form of long-term incentives, often tied to share price in the future, to encourage longer term focus. Do executives do things that are good for the share price but ultimately unethical or just bad for the company? Give examples.

Answer 1

1.

Pay Secrecy Policy	Pay Openness Policy
This policy is not revealed to all employees and is kept reserved with the top management and few officials of the Human Resource department.	It is an open arena/portal wherein data of all employees are collectively stored and any employee can access any one's pay structure just with a managerial authorisation level.
These are very easily subject to tampering as being kept held wit very few people in the organisation, salaries of employees are subject to whims and fancies of such decision making authorities.	Here there are strictly laid down parameters and payscale of each and every employee in the organisation is evaluated based on those parameters and are readily available for everyone's eyes.
Human intereference is high which inturn is a threat to employee satisfaction and job ownership.	System driven and less or no scope for tampering. Thus employee are more motivated towards acheieving organisational goals.

COMPARABLE WORTH: This is a proveb which should be based entirely on educational qualification, job profile execution and productivity. However in several industries comparable worth of an indvidual is based entirely on their gender. A male is understood to be completely upto the mark capable to discharge his duties efficiently. However a woman is still assumed to me not worthy of being compared to their male counterparts since being a woman is understood to be a weakness, an inability to discharge reponsibilities efficiently. Thus comparable worth of women if nothing in comparison to a man. This male chauvinist hypothesis is totally irrational and is a feature of the previous generations wherein women were considered weak and inept for doing any work in the outside world.

Comoarable worth is one's technical advantage, training, industrial experience, education, ability to handly irrational work situations, multitasking, management skills alongwith HR practices and is neven gender linked worth.

Negotiations for job responsibilities or better job profile is understood and is credible of an individual however bargaining for a particular pay structure should be discouraged. The organisations sould clearly spell out their pay structure for a particular job profile and irrescpective of the gender of the applicant, companies should make selection without entertaining any compensation package negotiations.

2.

Companies are in the habit of exponential salary structure as one climbs up the job hierarchy. Top management is always renumerated handsomely and exponentially as compared to the metrics at the lower or middle management levels. The incetive/bonus of top management is also linked to quarterly/ monthly achivements. The most lucrative way of rewarding the top management of the company is by way of stocks of the company/share in the stocks of the company. Thus they get motivated to succeed the companies growth unprecetendetly so that the company's share price rises and so does their share of stock rewrads.

High remuneration compared to lower average employee salary has been a constant pay trend in our country. However this justification that they are the driving force of the company is correct but unjust as their laid down policies are eventually excuted by the employees. Thus a better structured and performance linked compensation would be sanctioned to all employees and top management. Shares of the company should even be rewarded to lower and middle management staff to keep them even more motivated. Thus ratios of CEOs or top management is not justifiable and needs to be recaliberated.

There have been several cases weherin news drive the stock price soaring however many unethical pratices have been applied by the CEOs/Top Management of the company to design those news. Best industry example is of Kinfisher Airlines which became bankrupt and its CEO Mr Vijay Malaya fled from the country to save himself from federal custody. With his many prodigal investments he diverted all the genuine funds of the airlines to creating fixed assets in several countries while misrepresenting facts in the balance sheet of the airlines. With manouvered numbers in the balance sheet showing inflated profit margins the investors were attracted towrds investing more in the company while the CEO was busy fabricating parameters to fool investors. This ultimately led to Mr Malaya achieveing his malicious ways and leaving a big hole in the banks/financial institutions which lent money to Kingfisher Airlines. Thus there should be check even on CEOs and top management of every organisations who have a social responsibility towards their employees and investors to give the correct picture of the company.