Pay cuts and (mis)aligned incentives

Today I finished delivering mail by 3 pm. This is very early considering it is Wednesday – 9 hour day, and it feels like I have so much extra leftover. The reason why we got so early is because we didn't have any adds to deliver, like we usually do on Wednesdays, and the reason for the lack thereof, was a strike in the sorting center where they come from. You see, Posti (the company I work for) is doing some internal changes and therefore shifting some workers under another subsidiary which is going to change to a different employers' Association. The catch is that under the new association, the different collective labor agreement would cut the workers' salary by 30%, even 50% according to PAU (Post and Logistic Union).

These changes wouldn't affect me though, because the changes concern those who work in the big sorting centers. I work in a local delivery center. Either way, the negotiations won't likely have gone resolved before I'm leaving Posti in December, so it will not have much of a impact on my life. Sucks for those who sort packages in the centers though – their work is actually physically more demanding than mine.

The way this shifting in agreement is justified, is to keep up with the competition of other packet delivery companies. You know the drill: "at least you have jobs instead of no jobs after we've gone bankrupt." Meanwhile Posti's business result was 5.7 million euros on profit, and it payed almost 30 million in dividends to the government and almost 1,000,000€ to the CEO last year.

Considering that Posti is actually mostly owned by the Finnish government (50.1%), it raises questions like "how can a CEO in a government owned company earn more than the president?" Apparently he's done a good job, so he deserves some bonus. Good job in managing to save money so that the company can do more profit.

With this dynamic there's a misalignment of incentives with the lead and the workers – CEO doesn't get rewarded if he manages to create wealth and prosperity to its workers, but by creating more wealth for shareholders. From this standpoint, humans are just a necessary commodity to take care of so they can be extracted from. A separation of groups with different goals, hence, with different incentives.

Now let's look at Steem. Firstly, by owning Steem Power – which you can earn with your work – you become an owner of the network. In which jobs you have the opportunity to become an owner of the concern or company that is giving you the job? I assume there are some that give bit of stocks, but usually the authority over those is limited. Even if you had it all for yourself, it is mostly just passively sitting there. Sure there are shareholders' meetings, but the most important things are still done by the government where shareholders have no saying in.

But Steem Power is active stake, it gives you influence where there's a constant ongoing voting on where part of the inflation is going to be directed. You also have a direct say on who you think should be securing the blockchain by voting witnesses who keep the "decentralized Steem server" up. And now with the introduction of DAO, you can use stake to vote for worker proposals – funded from the inflation pool – that will hopefully bring forward more development that is beneficial for the ecosystem.

With the introduction of the DAO, the percentage of inflation pool devoted for authors was cut down to fund the worker proposals. But for the price of a cut, everyone with STEEM or Steem Power will benefit when the price rises with new tools increasing usability and adoption of the blockchain, that's the theory anyway (the incentive is there though, because voting happens with Steem Power). But when you get a price cut at your job, all you get is an affirmation of "at least you HAVE a job".

And the most important thing is, that for all the owners of Steem Power, the incestives are aligned, no matter what size, minnow or whale. Now, people just don't always act like it, because they don't realize what brings value; some are stuck thinking that maximization of extraction is the best option to get value, when instead, increasing the value of what we already have is much more important, and that value is established by co-operation and support. All this you can affect with your own Steem Power. Don't have enough of an impact, you say? Power up more. Don't have funds to buy into Steem? Try upping your content-game. People are looking for content to upvote, because with the separate downvote pool, the community has now become self-governed to decide what is being rewarded and what not, because what is good for the community, is not anymore misaligned with the best of the individual, now that the upvotes and downvote resources are separated. What this has created, is a dynamic where bid bots can no longer act as pure extraction tools, because the threat of downvotes (ie. lost profit) keeps them check and aligned to the will of the community. @smartsteem has actually started curating content with some of the leftover voting power. Bid bot converting into a curation bot – how cool is that?

People are quickly getting railed up here for all the "unjustice", yet when I look at the world, things are much more lopsided there for the small majority. In Steem, if small users crash, so do the whales, but in the world as we see it, rich get richer at the cost of "small users" getting poor. A lot of it is because the rich own, and the poor consume. Here owning is very easy, even with micro-amounts that would give no possibility for ownership in fiat world: all you gotta do, is press Power Up.