Individual Wages or Shared Wages?

[Moonface]

So I've worked for two different grocery stores in my life, one in England and one in the US, and one key difference between them (which may or may not be culturally related) is how they handle wages.

Individual Wages
I would assume this is how most businesses work regardless of country, which is where every employee is paid a different wage based upon their position, performance, skills, tenure, or a mixture of those things. The store I work at now in the US works this way, and my hourly wage can go up by 25 cents to $1 whenever I have an evaluation depending on how my evaluation actually goes. I'm sure there's a chance an evaluation can result in no raise (not counting being at the pay cap, which means you're already being paid the maximum hourly rate available), but that's going to be from a poor evaluation that will generally be your own fault.

I don't think your hourly wage can be decreased though through an evaluation, which does mean once you hit the pay cap there's not much reason to aim for an outstanding evaluation unless you're trying to move up the ladder or you're a part timer who doesn't want to risk losing hours. If you're full time and don't intend to move up though, you could just do enough to not get torn a new one and not put your job/position at risk because doing extra isn't going to potentially get you a higher raise.

In simple terms for anyone not aware of this structure, everyone in the job will be getting paid differently per hour even if they all share the same position based on various factors and personal performance, and if you aren't seeking anything beyond your current position then evaluations matter a lot less when you can no longer get a raise from them.

Shared Wages
This is how my job in England was, and it probably still runs on this format but @Mr EliteL can confirm that for me since he still works at that same job I was at. So how it worked was everybody in the store who wasn't a team leader or a manager got paid the same hourly wage, regardless of performance, tenure, or almost anything else. There were people at that store who had been there for 20+ years when I started, and I made the exact same hourly wage they did. Raises were once a year, and it was the company as a whole deciding what to increase the hourly rate to, but I have no clue what it was based on. I assume company performance and what rate competing stores were offering were at least some factors in the choice.

If you were paid more than the standard hourly wage, it was done as an addon wage. So for example, bakers got £1 an hour extra because they were bakers, and I think anyone trained to be a first aid responder also got extra. Technically bakers are making a higher wage, but because it was tied to the role and not the person it meant if you stopped being a baker and did say, cashiering, you can't try to keep the higher wage nor could you try to argue being paid that higher wage if you were a baker covering another department, since you aren't in that moment working as a baker.

Now the other big difference with this job was it didn't do full time or part time positions for any non-leadership positions. (If you're full time in the US, it is a guaranteed 40 hours a week no matter what, whilst part time is whatever you get given and can go up and down from week to week.) This meant the only real factor that made a difference in how much you got per paycheck was the hours you work, and that was pretty much based on how available you are and how reliable you are. Better workers are generally going to get more hours than those who don't really do a lot, and as such make more money, which is kinda like the US system except for that it's you get more money per hour rather than just more hours.

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Now keep in mind, this is my experience solely within two jobs. I have no idea if shared wages is a common approach in England or if maybe just this one grocery chain does it, nor do I know if anywhere in the US does it (my guess would be no). But I've always found it an interesting difference where I can never fully decide which way I like more because they're in as many ways different as they are similar, so I'm curious what everyone else thinks of the two, especially since I doubt anyone except for myself and @Mr EliteL have even experienced a shared wage environment.

[Mr EliteL]

Yeah our place roughly is still going by that method Moony has mentioned.
I say roughly, there has been changes, as security was previously separate from the normal workers, then got changed to be with the store (they wore new Asda Security uniforms) and just recently they removed those apart from a couple and are hiring outside for the rest of security so I don't what their wages are like. Also bakery colleagues has been reduced down to a bare minimum now, still has a section leader and like a couple of colleagues, so I'm not sure if that extra £1 still applies for them or if it does, that was a reason why they've whittled down as another way to save on money/wages.

Overtime also adds on to what we're expecting to receive, so some my get more that others, but that is also down to 15min increments within a an hour. So 25% of the hourly rate.

I do think that annual review to decide if the worker deserves more should be in effect over here. Those who bust their arse should get a little extra over those who do less or stand around chatting without getting on with their work. Banter is alright but the amount of times I've seen them stop working is too much really. Eh...

[Dragon Lord]

Definitely individual wages. A worker who busts their ass off on the job should get more frequent raises and higher raises than someone who doesn't even do the bare minimum the jobs asks of them.

The sad thing is that most jobs don't even do that any more because we've entered and era where instead of rewarding good workers, companies would rather cut the people who are being paid at a higher rate and hire new people instead because it allows them to save money. It's mostly seen in the retail business right now. Why pay that 15-year worker $20/hr when you can cut them and hire someone new for $15/hr? Then businesses wonder why their employees don't give a shit and don't bust their asses off for them any more (I've read many stories of Walmart being a huge participant in this practice. A lot of people fired for really vague reasons who were making several dollars more an hour than other employees/new hires).

So you might say "well if that's the case, wouldn't shared wages be better so people don't get let go for making more money?" Well, that comes with the problem of someone needs to get the work done, and if everyone is making the same amount of money no matter how hard they work, then you're going to have a lot of employees goofing off and not working while a small handful of them are absolutely busting their asses off to make up the difference. Unless the company is watching carefully to make sure they take care of the people who aren't working at all (which I doubt 90% of them even pay attention to that), then it's just going to massively reward the horrible employees while punishing the good ones.

So I definitely say individual way is much better, but we need to do something about this current era of replacing employees who are "making too much" according to company standards and replacing them with new hires so they can save that difference in pay. There needs to be better protections for employees that make it much harder to just let them go for random reasons. A Union is good for this, but the problem is that for every good Union, there's a couple of them that aren't good (SAG-AFTRA is a great example of what a terrible Union looks like), so there is work that needs to be done on that front too. Though if you can get into a field that does have a great Union behind their backs, you'll be set for life as long as you're not completely incompetent at the job (blue collar jobs usually have great Unions backing them).

[Moonface]

Yeah our place roughly is still going by that method Moony has mentioned.
I say roughly, there has been changes, as security was previously separate from the normal workers, then got changed to be with the store (they wore new Asda Security uniforms) and just recently they removed those apart from a couple and are hiring outside for the rest of security so I don't what their wages are like. Also bakery colleagues has been reduced down to a bare minimum now, still has a section leader and like a couple of colleagues, so I'm not sure if that extra £1 still applies for them or if it does, that was a reason why they've whittled down as another way to save on money/wages.

Overtime also adds on to what we're expecting to receive, so some my get more that others, but that is also down to 15min increments within a an hour. So 25% of the hourly rate.

I don't recall overtime being a thing when I worked there, and I'm sure I managed to pull 45+ hour weeks during the holiday season multiple times. The only benefit I knew to doing that was knowing that after the New Year the store would be completely dead and we'd get sent home early to make up for the extra budget use during the holidays to have people working more hours, so you just worked more in December knowing you would get more time off in January and lose no pay because the extra pay/hours in December would balance out the lower pay/hours in January.

Definitely individual wages. A worker who busts their ass off on the job should get more frequent raises and higher raises than someone who doesn't even do the bare minimum the jobs asks of them.

If raises are more frequent and/or aren't capped at very low amounts I'd definitely pick individual wages over shared. For my current job though it's one raise per year, where the best you'll get is like 50 cents, so then it doesn't feel like it makes much difference how hard you work because you've got to be really shit to somehow get no raise at all.

1. The sad thing is that most jobs don't even do that any more because we've entered and era where instead of rewarding good workers, companies would rather cut the people who are being paid at a higher rate and hire new people instead because it allows them to save money. It's mostly seen in the retail business right now. Why pay that 15-year worker $20/hr when you can cut them and hire someone new for $15/hr? Then businesses wonder why their employees don't give a shit and don't bust their asses off for them any more (I've read many stories of Walmart being a huge participant in this practice. A lot of people fired for really vague reasons who were making several dollars more an hour than other employees/new hires).
   
   
2. So you might say "well if that's the case, wouldn't shared wages be better so people don't get let go for making more money?" Well, that comes with the problem of someone needs to get the work done, and if everyone is making the same amount of money no matter how hard they work, then you're going to have a lot of employees goofing off and not working while a small handful of them are absolutely busting their asses off to make up the difference. Unless the company is watching carefully to make sure they take care of the people who aren't working at all (which I doubt 90% of them even pay attention to that), then it's just going to massively reward the horrible employees while punishing the good ones.
   
   
3. So I definitely say individual way is much better, but we need to do something about this current era of replacing employees who are "making too much" according to company standards and replacing them with new hires so they can save that difference in pay. There needs to be better protections for employees that make it much harder to just let them go for random reasons. A Union is good for this, but the problem is that for every good Union, there's a couple of them that aren't good (SAG-AFTRA is a great example of what a terrible Union looks like), so there is work that needs to be done on that front too. Though if you can get into a field that does have a great Union behind their backs, you'll be set for life as long as you're not completely incompetent at the job (blue collar jobs usually have great Unions backing them).
   

1. Yeah, although in the case of the retail store I work at we just have corporate reducing the number of hours we can allocate to everyone in a department per week. Full timers have to get their 40 hours a week, but if my manager gets 200 hours for a week that gets stretched very thin once they schedule the three full timers they have and only have 80 hours left for however many part timers the grocery department at my store has nowadays. I don't think my store has ever hit a point of having to not schedule a part timer even a single decent shift a week but I know other stores have run into that. The biggest problem my store has though is because the company will never lay people off, and we're running on a bare minimum of people, there are part timers who just don't give a shit because they know nothing will happen when it'll be worse for management to not schedule them than to have them in doing a bare minimum.
   
   
2. That was the only thing that made shared wages work at my old job. Those who were known to be good workers were consistently getting the most hours per week, and those who weren't doing anything got like 8 hours at best. That was reflected with vacation time because everyone got 4 weeks as standard, but that 4 weeks was calculated as an average of your weekly hours, so those who worked less technically got less vacation time. I got something like 32 hours x 4 weeks of paid vacation, whilst others only got 10 hours x 4 weeks. We both got 4 weeks off, but I can split 128 hours in a lot more ways and across a lot more weeks than someone can with only 40 hours.
   
   As an extra point to this one, my job doesn't do it anymore I think but they used to give holiday bonuses to everyone each year. The problem was all full timers got 80 hours of pay as bonus, while part timers all got 8 hours of bonus pay, and the issue with that was I could have an average of 30 hours a week while someone else only works 8 hours a week (due to their availability, not their work ethic) and we both got the exact same bonus. That's a case where doing something shared is done badly, because that should totally be done based on the average each person works per week and not just "everyone who works 4-39 hours a week gets the same bonus".
   
   
3. My old job had a union, but I can't recall if I ever joined it. To add on to the improvements you said need to be done, another is people learning that it is in fact not illegal to discuss your pay/wages with other workers. My current job has seemingly backed off on trying to make people think that they're not allowed to discuss that stuff, at least within my store anyway, but when it was pushing that "rule" it irked me a lot when I learned that they're not actually allowed to forbid workers from talking about that stuff.
   

[Dragon Lord]

Raises definitely do need to happen more frequently and be more substantial. My current boss would love to give out more raises, but unfortunately can't because Corporate says "No, the CEO can't afford not having that 25 cents extra in his multi-million dollar wage every year." My last job did the same thing, you just got one yearly raise and it was usually something idiotic like 45 cents (and this was considered a very high, very good raise). I started there at $18/hr ($3 overnight premium, so base pay was $15/hr), then in 2023 the entire company got a $1 raise to base pay to "combat" inflation, which put my base at $16/hr ($19/hr between 10 PM and 6 AM), and when I was terminated, I was at something like $17.98/$20.98 an hour. So in actual raises, I got less than $2 in four years. These retail corporations wonder why their turnover rates are so high, but then they don't even blink when you bring up how little they actually appreciate their employees. You can't expect to hold on to anyone long-term when you don't show even an ounce of some kind of appreciation for what they go through on your behalf (especially when you work at a store with absolute garbage management like I had).

People will be like, "Well, you're only doing this low-skill job, you don't deserve to get paid much.", yet they'd be the first people throwing up a huge tantrum if these people weren't there doing these jobs so they could spend $300 of their EBT on candy bars and bottles of pop (funny how it's always the people who don't work and mooch off of the government who tend to tell others what they're worth being paid for what job they're doing -- and I'm not talking about the people who actually need the assistance to live, I'm talking about the ones who clearly don't). Like okay, if we don't deserve to get paid much, then you don't need to be here to buy your candy, pop, cigarettes or lottery tickets.

Corporate controlling how many hours a store is able to schedule is one of the dumbest things about these jobs. Both of my last job and my current one do it (as I'm sure most retail corporations do), and it's just idiotic. There will be complaints about things not getting done fast enough, yet they'll only be willing to allow 2-3 people scheduled and then expect them to get the work of 10 people done in just a couple of hours. My last job was really good for this. They'd only schedule two of us on the overnight, but the kitchen NEEDED at least two people in there because of how much work there was to be done, but the company wanted to save money by scheduling less people. Of course it wasn't the day shift that saw cuts, they still had their 8-12 workers for the 6 AM - 2 PM shift (because god forbid the managers actually got off of their asses and out of the office to actually go help around the store), while cutting back slightly on the 2 PM - 10 PM shift and majorly on the overnight shift. We should have had four overnight workers every night, so that everything could actually get done, but instead they decided that two of us would be enough and we'd each just have to find a way to magically get all of the work done. But of course when it came to things not getting done, it was never, "We understand, we're short staffing you so it's to be expected that not everything can get done every night." Instead it was basically, "Wow, you guys are complete shit workers. What do you mean you can't get three people's worth of work done by yourself?"

My current boss tries to reward the good workers by giving you the bulk of the hours, though right now it's not really possible because we have just enough workers to cover every shift for the entire week, so everyone is getting around the same hours. Though proving yourself a good worker definitely comes in handy because if there's a shift that needs to be covered in an emergency and she can't do it herself, I'll usually be the first person she asks if I can do it. So that really helps me soak up as much hours as possible, which I need. The stupid thing about this company though is that they want people capped at 35 hours max, instead of 40. I want 40 hours a week, so being stuck at 30-35 because that's all the company wants people to have really irks me. Thankfully there are quite a few very unreliable workers here though, so getting an 5 hours a week isn't too uncommon for me.

Companies getting rid of holiday bonuses is just the biggest sign of, "We don't actually care about you" you can possibly have. It's once a year, it's at a time of the year that's supposed to be about giving, and a company is just like, 'Nah, CEO needs his 14th yacht so you guys just have to go without." Though the company I work for now gives kind of a joke of a "holiday bonus" (it's straight up just $100, nothing factors into getting it). The last company I worked for had a profit sharing check at the end of every fiscal year (well, you had to wait 3-4 months to actually get the check, fiscal year ended in September, but you wouldn't get the check until end of November-early December). That was the only thing worth working there for. It was based on the hours you worked through the year and your pay, so as an overnight worker with the $3 premium bonus, and working full-time all year, my profit sharing checks were normally around $3,600-$4,000. Sad thing is despite how good that sounds, the company 100% used this as a reason to fuck us over through out the year. Like how badly they short staffed us on the overnight shift and then expected us to get all of the work done despite only having one of us in the kitchen and out in the store respectively. So despite how good the check was, unfortunately it came with the negative strings of the company going "look at how much we give you at the end of the year, you should be giving us your soul as thanks for our extreme generosity." So even in a good situation like this profit sharing, it had so much negativity with it because of them hiding behind it as a shield for effectively abusing their workers. It got to the point where despite how good that check was, it just wasn't worth going through an entire year of the bullshit at that place. My plan was to leave after the check last year, but as we all know, things happened a lot differently.

To your last point, yes, never let your company tell you that it's illegal to talk about your pay. It NEVER is and they only want to make you believe it is so that people don't find out how much their fellow co-workers are working. They don't want that 10-year employee finding out that new hires are making the same amount of money they are, because obviously anyone would be absolutely livid in that situation. It's just another scum tactic on the part of corporations to try and get away with fucking over as many people as possible without any of them finding out and getting mad about it. Again, as I mentioned in my last post, Walmart is a prime example of this. I've seen countless employees talking online how they (as a 15+ year veteran of the company) are being paid at the same rate as brand new hires are and that is complete and utter bullshit. There's no way you should work for a company for 15 years and not be making a noticeable amount more than brand new hires are. They don't want those people to find out that newbies are making the same amount, because then they're going to go to management and demand raises because they should be making more than the base pay after that long with the company (which is 100% true).

But don't worry, some day corpos will get their wish of fully automated stores so the CEO doesn't have to go through the horror of watching all that money go out the door to the lowly peasants working under him/her and will get to pocket an extra $2 million on top of the $500+ million they are already paying themselves for the year.