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Right now in Australia there's 'same work, same pay' legislation being discussed. Some people do the same work much better than others and logically deserve more pay.

Seems to me like it would be easy to do an end-run around this by giving high performing employees a slightly different job title while they're still doing the same work.

Isn't this what bonuses were originally intended to be? Do better/more/higher quality work, get a reward?

I've never worked a job where "bonuses" were part of it and you got them at the end of the year regardless of what you had done, so I probably have a completely different view to people where "bonuses" are just a way around providing compensation without incurring tax. 'Yeah of course I get my yearly bonus, that's part of my salary package'.

[...] providing compensation without incurring tax.

In what country does this work? In the US, at least, bonuses are taxed as ordinary income. (They're included along with salary and tips in box 1 of the W-2 form that the employer files with the IRS.)

I remember seeing this done regularly when my company submitted the immigration forms for workers. The purpose of the form was to prove that me (the immigrant) is necessary to the company and no American can be hired instead of importing a filthy foreigner. Obviously, since the company has been employing me for years already, they wanted me to keep working for them, only in the US (and same for other people they were relocating). So they made a job description matching our jobs and skills exactly, so the chance there would be a person with the same skills and experience (who also would see the ad and want to apply) is negligible. Of course, it worked - they published the ads, waited the appropriate time, nobody applied, and they honestly wrote in the immigration forms that people they want to relocate are unique and irreplaceable.

Another common practice is adding qualifiers - you've got Engineer, then Senior Engineer, then Senior Staff Engineer, then Distinguished Senior Staff Engineer, then Distinguished Senior Staff Engineering Fellow, and you can go on with it forever, and obviously each of these is a totally different job.

I've also heard that the over-specifying thing is trivially easy to do in academia. To the point that there are basically no restrictions on importing qualified academic talent. For academia they just write job requirements looking for a person that has written on topics X, Y, and Z. And they will make each of those topics basically the title paper of the academic they want to hire. The end result being that literally only one person in the world is qualified for the job ... the person they want to hire.

Yes, but also no. It's definitely practice to over-specify it towards a specific person and that gives the person a giant edge. But if a super-star scientist (relatively speaking) comes around and applies for the job, they will often be hard-pressed to turn them down. This is quite rare however, and generally benefits the institutions (either they get exactly the person they want, or some kind of super-star).

I think it's a good thing (probably being an immigrant skews my perspective, but still I think it's an objectively good thing). I understand the fears about importing cheap labor worsening conditions of current workers, and maybe sometimes it is true. But I don't think academia is the place where it is true. I didn't spend much time in academia to have relevant experience but in general that seems to be the case.

I’d guess this is the kind of thing that gets enforced by lawsuits. @AshLael, any thoughts?

Currently the bill in question is still in the drafting stage. A consultation paper has been put out with the express purpose of working through finnicky issues like this.

So currently it's not exactly clear how they're going to structure it to avoid loopholes and enforce compliance. But I would expect the Fair Work Commission to play a large role in whatever design ultimately gets chosen. It's very unlikely that enforcement will be left to private lawsuits.

https://xkcd.com/1494/

Anyone creating such a law would have already thought of obvious workarounds like this and done something to avoid them.

Anyone creating such a law would have already thought of obvious workarounds like this and done something to avoid them.

Absolutely not, see this: https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc846f2a19d87b03440848f1

sam brinton must have read the alt-text on that comic

Low effort swipes at your outgroup are not permitted. Don't post like this please.

Are they outlawing piecework?