All employers are concerned that they pay their employees a just compensation. And no employee would be happy working in an organization which he regards as under-paying him.
What is fair pay?
There is no easy answer. No ready formula. The formulation of a good pay scale requires factoring in of considerations like kind of work, degree of responsibility, working conditions, degrees of skill needed, and actual performance.
Of course, there are no universally-accepted standards for any of those job evaluation category measures, and pay classification is left up to the (nondiscriminatory) choices of each employer. Since each enterprise is different in some way, it is logical and proper that each employer will have its own unique value system for paying workers “fairly” according to its particular standards.
There is a legislated minimum wage to begin with, which is supposed to be the least a household needs to be free from want and hunger. The pay scale system starts from this base, increasing from employee to employee, proportionate with the rise of responsibility and skills requirement.
Compensation scale may also depend on the economic climate in a town, city or region, the standard of living prevailing in the community, the taxes that the workers have to pay the government. This is why minimum wage levels vary from place to place and there are regional wage boards.
A fair pay scale is one that does not discriminate based on sex, race, origin for work in equivalent jobs. Equivalent jobs are those whose composite of skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions are equivalent in value, even if the jobs are dissimilar. In the Philippines, there is still a perceived disparity of compensation in terms of gender but the gap is slowly being closed.