So I'm automatically less productive compared to another (less senior) supervisor because I'm topped out??? Please explain....
Drastic fleet changes aside, I wonder how adopting the payscale UPS has (pay is based on time with the company instead of type flown) would affect this?
Overall productivity can be broken down into two components:
Physical productivity (widgets produced per hour) and
Rate productivity (dollars paid per hour). This overall productivity is effectively the dollars paid per widget produced.
If you are top scale and earn $20/hr, and you produce 110 widgets per hour and your co-worker makes $15/hr and produces 100 widgets per hour, who is more productive in total?
The guy that makes $15/hr is more productive, because his unfavorable physical productivity (10% fewer widgets per hour) is more than offset by the favorable rate productivity (25% less pay per hour).
In most airline unionized positions, it would be difficult to assign a higher physical productivity to a group of more senior employees. For example, a 12 year pilot is going to get the plane from A to B in the same amount of time and in the same condition as a 6 year pilot. In addition, the 6 year guy uses less vacation and likely calls in sick less, so he is actually more productive on both measures (physical and rate).
That's why a topped out employee is
generally less productive than a lower paid employee that is in the same work group. Naturally, there are exceptions here, as a new hire or someone that just wasn't catching on would probably have such a miserable physical productivity that the pay rate differential doesn't make the junion person more productive. I guess the underlying assumption I'm using here is that after 3 to 4 years on the job, there probably isn't much of a physical productivity gain with years of service, and since the rates go up with years of service, the 3+ guys are probably much more productive in total than top step guys.
