Fair Isn’t Equal
May 13, 2013, 6:05 PM | Updated: 7:22 pm
QUESTION: Eric on Twitter asks if it’s okay to pay two employees who do the same job different salaries. Dave says fair isn’t equal.
ANSWER: Yeah. Fair is not equal. Equal is not fair. Michael Jordan plays better basketball than I do. That’s not fair. But we’re not equal. He’s not going to get paid the same. There are no two people who do the exact same job the exact same way.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say I had two personal assistants inside of our organization. Both of them were personal assistants to VPs, but one of them is a personal assistant to a VP who is extremely profitable and running a very large department where the other one is a personal assistant to a VP who’s running a department that’s brand-new and not yet profitable. And one of them is a personal assistant who’s been in her seat as a personal assistant to a VP for 10 years, and the other one’s been there 10 months. There’s an example where it’s very easy in my mind for the one who’s been there longer and in a more profitable department would be making more. That would make more sense to me. That’s kind of how we get at it.
