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 be quantified and traded. To the extent that performance pay comes to be seen as natural, it will make irrelevant good working relationships, turn workers into competitors who vie to sell their skills and polish their KPIs, and minimise loyalty and responsibility both to the community and to the wider society through the enterprise.
It naturally leads to short-term employment, and corrodes the mutual loyalties of workers and management, so leading inevitably to the loss of stored wisdom in the enterprise.
These consequences will be particularly harmful in educational, health and welfare organisations that work directly with people. Their effectiveness depends on the generosity of their workers in forming, encouraging and sustaining a gossamer web of relationships that are often intangible and involve self-effacement.
Workers strongly committed generally to these enterprises, and concretely to those whom it serves, will be insulted and betrayed by the suggestion that more money might inspire them to work harder, or by temptations to work harder in ways that are personally unsustainable for financial profit.
It is significant that performance pay is rife in financial businesses like banking and accounting, and has so generated support in business schools and consultancy firms that conduct surveys for government. Its effectiveness for productivity has become part of conventional wisdom.
It should give pause that it was precisely the breach of trust in relationships in the financial industry and the loss of wisdom in banking institutions that created the financial crisis. Pay for performance appears to have worked very efficiently in producing catastrophe.
I do not wish to deny the complexity facing the Victorian Government. It needs a policy that will attract good teachers who have a good understanding of their disciplines and skills, who can teach them well, and can interest and attract young people to realise their possibilities at all levels. These are high goals that require high commitment as well as high gifts. People serving the community so generously should be well remunerated.
But there are many calls on the public purse. As in all other areas, too, some teachers will surely have given up on high goals and do only what is necessary to keep their job.
These are realities. But at best the introduction of performance pay would be an irrelevance. No doubt many people with strong values will survive it, as they do other forms of idiocy. At worst the ideology that inspires it will fracture the delicate network of relationships that links teachers, students, schools and the larger community, and make it natural to view education as a commodity. That would be a tragedy for all of us.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street. Images courtesy Jesuit Refugee Service.