Isn’t it difficult to measure effort or sacrifice?

Firstly, each workplace has complete autonomy over how they go about measuring differences in effort or sacrifice between themselves. Let’s consider in turn some of the different ways a workplace might go about this. A workplace could choose one or a combination of the following:

Duration: A workplace could decide to simply have the same hourly income. Measuring differences in the number of hours a person works is easy and straightforward.

Unpleasant or dangerous tasks: It’s also not hard to grade how unpleasant or dangerous a task is. Workers could list all the tasks that need to be done in their workplace and rank them accordingly. For example, this could be done quite coarsely if one wished by simply putting tasks into three categories: Pleasant, moderate and unpleasant.

Intensity: Some workplaces may choose to factor in differences in how hard people work. Even if this done coarsely, say, by having three categories (low, moderate and high), this is more difficult to measure than the above two factors and one can imagine many workplaces may choose to ignore this entirely. However, for those that do consider this, as an example of this in practise today, the Morning Star is a self-managed tomato processing factory in California with over 400 workers, who have a peer evaluation remuneration committee whereby co-workers submit effort ratings and use that as a basis for their annual salary reviews.