Individual Wages or Shared Wages?

[Moonface]

So I've worked for two different grocery stores in my life, one in England and one in the US, and one key difference between them (which may or may not be culturally related) is how they handle wages.

Individual Wages
I would assume this is how most businesses work regardless of country, which is where every employee is paid a different wage based upon their position, performance, skills, tenure, or a mixture of those things. The store I work at now in the US works this way, and my hourly wage can go up by 25 cents to $1 whenever I have an evaluation depending on how my evaluation actually goes. I'm sure there's a chance an evaluation can result in no raise (not counting being at the pay cap, which means you're already being paid the maximum hourly rate available), but that's going to be from a poor evaluation that will generally be your own fault.

I don't think your hourly wage can be decreased though through an evaluation, which does mean once you hit the pay cap there's not much reason to aim for an outstanding evaluation unless you're trying to move up the ladder or you're a part timer who doesn't want to risk losing hours. If you're full time and don't intend to move up though, you could just do enough to not get torn a new one and not put your job/position at risk because doing extra isn't going to potentially get you a higher raise.

In simple terms for anyone not aware of this structure, everyone in the job will be getting paid differently per hour even if they all share the same position based on various factors and personal performance, and if you aren't seeking anything beyond your current position then evaluations matter a lot less when you can no longer get a raise from them.

Shared Wages
This is how my job in England was, and it probably still runs on this format but @Mr EliteL can confirm that for me since he still works at that same job I was at. So how it worked was everybody in the store who wasn't a team leader or a manager got paid the same hourly wage, regardless of performance, tenure, or almost anything else. There were people at that store who had been there for 20+ years when I started, and I made the exact same hourly wage they did. Raises were once a year, and it was the company as a whole deciding what to increase the hourly rate to, but I have no clue what it was based on. I assume company performance and what rate competing stores were offering were at least some factors in the choice.

If you were paid more than the standard hourly wage, it was done as an addon wage. So for example, bakers got £1 an hour extra because they were bakers, and I think anyone trained to be a first aid responder also got extra. Technically bakers are making a higher wage, but because it was tied to the role and not the person it meant if you stopped being a baker and did say, cashiering, you can't try to keep the higher wage nor could you try to argue being paid that higher wage if you were a baker covering another department, since you aren't in that moment working as a baker.

Now the other big difference with this job was it didn't do full time or part time positions for any non-leadership positions. (If you're full time in the US, it is a guaranteed 40 hours a week no matter what, whilst part time is whatever you get given and can go up and down from week to week.) This meant the only real factor that made a difference in how much you got per paycheck was the hours you work, and that was pretty much based on how available you are and how reliable you are. Better workers are generally going to get more hours than those who don't really do a lot, and as such make more money, which is kinda like the US system except for that it's you get more money per hour rather than just more hours.

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Now keep in mind, this is my experience solely within two jobs. I have no idea if shared wages is a common approach in England or if maybe just this one grocery chain does it, nor do I know if anywhere in the US does it (my guess would be no). But I've always found it an interesting difference where I can never fully decide which way I like more because they're in as many ways different as they are similar, so I'm curious what everyone else thinks of the two, especially since I doubt anyone except for myself and @Mr EliteL have even experienced a shared wage environment.

[Mr EliteL]

Yeah our place roughly is still going by that method Moony has mentioned.
I say roughly, there has been changes, as security was previously separate from the normal workers, then got changed to be with the store (they wore new Asda Security uniforms) and just recently they removed those apart from a couple and are hiring outside for the rest of security so I don't what their wages are like. Also bakery colleagues has been reduced down to a bare minimum now, still has a section leader and like a couple of colleagues, so I'm not sure if that extra £1 still applies for them or if it does, that was a reason why they've whittled down as another way to save on money/wages.

Overtime also adds on to what we're expecting to receive, so some my get more that others, but that is also down to 15min increments within a an hour. So 25% of the hourly rate.

I do think that annual review to decide if the worker deserves more should be in effect over here. Those who bust their arse should get a little extra over those who do less or stand around chatting without getting on with their work. Banter is alright but the amount of times I've seen them stop working is too much really. Eh...