Section 2. Skills focus.

Exercise 1. Read the following text and answer the questions.

Fair Pay for Pecan Workers.

The Cloverdale Pecan Company is one of the country's largest processors of pecans. Located in a medium-sized southern town, it employs approximately 1,350 people. Although Cloverdale does own a few pecan orchards, the great majority of the nuts it processes are bought on the open market. The processing involves grading the nuts for both size and quality, shelling, packaging, and shipping them to customers. Most buyers are candy manufacturers.

Cloverdale, which was started 19 years ago by the family of company president Jackson Massie, has been continually expanding since its inception. As do most growing companies, Cloverdale has always paid whatever was necessary to fill a vacancy without having a formal wage and salary system. Jackson Massie suspected that some wage inequities had developed over the years. His speculation was supported by complaints about such inequities from several good, long-term em­ployees. Therefore, Jackson hired a group of respected consultants to do a complete wage and salary study of all the nonexempt jobs in the company.

The study, which took five months to complete, confirmed Jackson's suspicion. Wages of several jobs were found to van' from the norm. Furthermore, the situation was complicated by several factors. First, many of the employees earning too much were being paid according to union wage scales. Cloverdale is not unionized, but most of its competitors are. Second, many of those m underpaid jobs were being paid at rates equal to similar positions in other companies in Cloverdale's geo­graphic area. Third, because of a tight labor market, many new employees had been hired at the top of the range for their respective grades. The study also revealed that the nature of many jobs had changed so much that they needed to be completely reclassified.

Questions:

1. What should Cloverdale do to correct the existing wage inequities?

2. How could the company have prevented these problems?

3. If it is recommended that some jobs be placed in a lower pay grade, how might Cloverdale implement these adjustments?

Exercise 2. Read the following text and answer the questions.

A Dead-End Street?

Early in December, Roger Tomlin was called in for his annual salary review. Roger was a staff engineer for the Zee Engineering Company, which he had been with for just over 10 years. In the past, Roger had usually received what he considered to be a fair pay raise. During this salary review, his manager Ben Jackson informed Roger that he was recommending a 10 percent raise. Ben went on to extol the fine job Roger had done in the past year and to explain that Roger should be especially proud of the above-average pay raise he would be getting. Upon reflec­tion, Roger was rather proud; in 10 years, he had been promoted twice, and his annual salary- had gone from $23,000 to 538,000.

Things were moving along just fine for Roger until he discovered a few weeks later that a new engineer right out of college had just been hired by Zee at a starting salary of 535,000. It really upset Roger to think that a new, unproven engineer would be starting at a salary almost equal to his.

Roger's first move was to talk to several of his colleagues. Most of Roger's fellow employees were aware of the situation and they didn't like it either. Luke Johnson, who had been an engineer with Zee for over 12 years, asked Roger if he realized that he was probably making less money, in actual dollars, than when he started at Zee. This really floored Roger. Roger realized that inflation had eaten into everyone's paycheck, but he had never even considered the possibility that he had not kept up with inflation. That evening, on the way home from work, Roger stopped by the local library and looked up the consumer price index (CPI) for the past 10 years. According to Roger's figures, if his pay had kept up exactly with inflation, he would be making $38,500!

After a very restless night, the first thing Roger did upon arriving at work the next day was go straight to personnel manager Joe Dixon's office. After presenting his case about the new employee and about how inflation had eroded his pay, Roger sat back and waited for Dixon's reply.

Joe started out by explaining that he understood just how Roger felt. At the same time, however, Joe stated that Roger had to consider the situation from the company's standpoint. The current supply and demand situation dictated that Zee had to pay 535,000 to get new engineers who were any good at all. Roger explained that he could understand that, but what he couldn't understand was why the company couldn't pay him and other senior engineers more money. Joe again sympathized with Roger but then went on to explain that it was a supply and demand situation. The fact of the matter was that senior engineers just didn't demand that much more pay than engineers just starting!

Questions

1. Do you think Roger is being fairly paid?

2. It you were Roger, how would you react to Joe's explanation?

3. Do you think a wage survey might help in this situation?

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