promotion is detrimental to society
Friday, April 04, 2008 (1:59 PM)
it's nothing new already to hear of the best investigator rising up the ranks or the best network engineer with a ccie (cisco certified internetwork expert) certification sitting high up on the corporate ladder or the best teacher promoted to management positions, probably as a principal. but i squirm at the idea of promotion not just as an exhibition or proof of non-conformity. as i already said much earlier, non-conformity has become pretty much conformity. but i digress.
despite the apparent plea to reconsider promoting the best and giving the job scopes of the elites an extreme makeover, i still stand by the pay increment system. doing away with all the explanations of the societal syndrome of lusting after career advancement, there really is a need to keep the best doing what they do best.
it simply does not make the least sense to me why the best in the field should be removed from their job and assigned something totally foreign so that they can start learning all over again and contribute in another department while compromising the levels of competence in the work that they are the best at.
this is also why stratification occurs in all lines of work because the best and the highest paid are often shifted to another position while those in the original role remain those of lower competence (as a relative concept) and, not to say, lower paid. discrimination is thus born.
to concretise the theory above, an example or two would do best and it is clearly, but not limited to, right where i began. if the best is simply paid the highest without a change of job scope, discrimination would no longer be based upon the job such that when one says that s/he works as a cleaner, it no longer conjures the image of a lowly-skilled-lowly-paid worker. similarly, a manager no longer means that s/he is better paid than a receptionist. now, that is being true to the singapore system of meritocracy and at the same time removing the ladder metaphor in the corporate world.
but a contradiction takes place. how then, should the "higher ranks" (without promotion, this term may be obsolete) come about? i have no answer to that and i do not have the luxury of time to brainstorm on a perfect plan. perhaps a more competent being would be able to patch this less than perfect idea of mine.
to sum up, as the discourse of argumentation has taught me, promotion is detrimental to society in 2 ways. first, it hampers the advancement of the lower ranks by removing the best from the job. second, it propagates discrimination of work (may i say workism?) by creating a cap to the salary of those in that line and correlating low pay to the job.
as a closing note, it is agreeable that the best should still be paid what they deserve. but paying them more for a job scope that they have no experience in? we really ought to check the sanity of those approving the promotion.