On Compensation
Entry posted by HM Solomon I ·
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So in this world alliances have assets that they control directly. They also have individuals managing these assets and the alliance on their behalf. These officials are typically uncompensated for their efforts. However, does this make sense? Is there a better model we could be following?
In real life, government officials draw wages from said government as compensation for their time and effort, for the same reasons employees of private enterprises draw wages. The principle reason is that this is how these organizations attract individuals to work for them, people have needs and wants that they wish to satisfy and they cannot do that without money which most get from working and drawing compensation.
Of course, in this world individuals work for alliances for entirely different reasons. They don't do so to earn a living, they do it to help their fellow members or they do it for power or for enjoyment (politics can be intriguing). Whatever the reason though, compensation can still play a role and can perhaps encourage better work and more activity.
In one potential mode, all officials in an alliance would draw a salary paid out bi-weekly (i.e., every other week). This wouldn't just be for those at the top, this would be for anyone doing work on the alliance's behalf (which means the work has to be sanctioned by someone with the authority to do so). Paying an elite group at the top and nobody else is bound to create resentment, for such a system to work well it must be the case that there are opportunities for just about anyone to get involved. Doesn't mean everyone has to be appointed or "hired" if they apply for a position but it cannot be the case that there is no possibility for anyone outside of the top leadership to get involved. An alliance would have to have someone designated as a paymaster who would have access to the alliance's bank and would dole out the payroll based on centrally coordinated records of who is employed by the alliance and at what rate. The paymaster need not be a new position and could serve concurrently as something else, but someone in the alliance has to serve this role because for people to be compensated someone has to actually cut the checks, so to speak. In addition to central records of who is employed and someone to manage the payroll, there must be a process to determine each official's compensation. The best way to do this is to have defined roles within the alliance and then assign specific compensation to those roles, so anyone fulfilling a role gets paid the salary assigned to that role. If someone is fulfilling multiple roles, alliances can either pay them the salary of the highest paid role or the combined salary of all their roles. The system may seem complex but it isn't really: define roles and their salaries, assign someone to pay them, and ensure you have a list of those employed to keep payroll accurate, which isn't really that difficult to put together.
The benefit of such a system is it incentivizes good work and activity. To continue to receive compensation which directly benefits individuals, those individuals have to remain employed. To remain employed they must meet the standards those with the authority to dismiss them set, which would likely include such things as being active and completing quality work. The side benefit is that it pumps money back into the alliance which can then be used to develop nations which leads to more income which is then taxed netting the alliance more revenue down the line, not to mention the military benefits of better developed nations. Of course, this doesn't mean compensation of government officials is a substitute for proper economic policy, but it also isn't without its economic benefits either.
There are, as always some downsides as well. The biggest one is that it makes running an alliance more expensive overall since it costs money to employ officials to run it. However, the goal is that this cost is offset partially by the economic side benefit described above and mostly by virtue of better quality work. If an alliance is better run in exchange for a financial cost, I'd say that's a good trade-off. The system could always be mismanaged via corruption (someone might use the payroll to hide embezzlement, for example) or via a lack of consistently enforced and well thought out standards for those employed. If the officials doing the hiring and firing are not ensuring their employees are actually performing well then the system won't lead to improvement in the quality of officials' work. It is important to remember that the cost of employing individuals and the pressure from others in the government and possibly other members to ensure the money isn't wasted will tend to correct for these issues. This system may very well lead to better standards than before; even without compensation, officials are still costing the alliance if they perform poorly in their roles as their work is what drives the success or failure of the alliance in an endeavor. The problem is it can be hard to measure an individual official's effect on the alliance as a whole, but it is easy to measure the cost of poor work if an alliance pays its officials: the cost is at least whatever that official is being paid. It is likely more (as above it costs the alliance in non-monetary ways as well) but it is at least a finite dollar amount that is readily quantified. This makes a rather nebulous concept more concrete and should therefore result in better and more consistently enforced standards. Compensation could be a powerful boon to alliances even with its short term costs.
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