How consistent should you be in paying someone for help?
A reader from Ohio we’re calling Lira wrote that she and husband sometimes hire teenagers or adults to help them with different projects at their home, which sits on 10 acres. They pay by the hour for an agreed-upon price for projects including weeding, raking, clearing brush, or helping to split and stack wood. Since they heat their home with wood, they are often cutting up fallen trees and using the split and stacked wood during the winter.
Recently, a tornado passed near their town, knocking down several trees on their property, causing them to look for help clearing up the branches and logs. “My husband was really just looking for some local teenager to come help with the grunt work of gathering up the branches and moving them,” wrote Lira. But they spoke with one gentleman who wanted $20 an hour which was more than their budget would allow for gathering branches and logs. They were looking to pay $15 an hour. “Not a big difference, but enough for our budget concerns.”
But the man also told Lira and her husband that he had experience using a chainsaw to cut the downed trees into logs and then splitting them. For splitting and cutting wood, Lira typically budgets $20 an hour because it involves more dangerous work and needs someone with experience who knows how to be careful.
Lira would like to hire the gentleman but wonders if it would be wrong to offer to pay him $15 an hour for the job that requires less experience and knowledge, but then pay that same person $20 an hour for the other job. “This question has been bugging me for a while now,” wrote Lira, who asked for advice.
It seems perfectly reasonable for the gentleman to ask for $20 an hour to do the work. But there would be nothing wrong if Lira asked him if he was willing to do the gathering of branches and logs for $15 an hour with the understanding that he would be paid $20 an hour for chainsaw and splitting work.
Lira needs to be prepared for him to say no to anything less than $20 an hour for any of the work. She then has the option of hiring a second person at a lower rate to do the work requiring less experience and to offer to hire the $20 an hour guy for the more experienced work.
He may or may not agree to the smaller job. If he doesn’t, Lira and her husband will be left trying to find someone else to do everything. As long as Lira is prepared that her offer may be rejected, there is nothing wrong with her presenting it as a possibility.
It's not unreasonable to expect that different kinds of work might be paid at a different rate even if it’s the same person doing it. It’s up to the prospective hire to agree or disagree.
The right thing is for Lira and her husband to be clear with whomever they attempt to hire from the outset about the scope of the work and what they are willing to pay. There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy, emeritus, at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @jseglin
(c) 2024 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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