The Victorian Government plans to introduce performance pay for teachers. The teachers' union has objected to this proposal on the grounds that teachers are special. The union is right to object, but its argument is faulty. Performance pay is not wrong for teachers because they are special, but because it is wrong for everybody.
The case for performance pay rests on the assumption that work is a commodity. It is the possession of the worker, and can be broken into its component parts and traded accordingly. The more marketable we make our work by meeting KPIs and the like, the greater the financial return we can negotiate. The theory is that financial incentives of this kind will develop more profitable and productive enterprises.
This view is destructive because it focuses on a single aspect of work. Work involves a complex series of human relationships that far transcend the payment by employer to employee for something possessed by the latter.
In working relationships people engage other persons to join them and to act with them in particular ways. The relationship implies commitments by both sides. It is expected that persons employed by an enterprise will give themselves to the persons who employ them, to the enterprise itself, and to the people whom it serves.
The relationship also implies that employers will welcome and have a care for those whom they employ and make them participants in their enterprise. The long-term health of the organisation itself will depend on the quality of all these complex sets of relationships.
In this understanding of work, the relationship between employer and employee is not that between a buyer and the seller of a commodity. It is between a person who offers a service and another who accepts that service and rewards the giver. This relationship has a contractual aspect, but it also needs to be described in terms of mutual gift. Those employed give themselves fully within the relationships involved in their work. Employers thank employees for their work through the gift of a wage.
The concept of performance pay at best obscures the quality of relationships and the element of gift involved in work. At worst it treats work as a commodity that can