Compressed Pay Ratios

A stated ceiling on the distance between the largest and smallest compensation inside a body — the structural refusal of extraction at the top.

A pay ratio is one number: what the highest-paid person receives divided by what the lowest-paid receives. Left unstated it drifts, because each raise at the top is individually defensible and the total is nobody's responsibility. Stated and capped, it becomes a constraint that does its work quietly and forever: the only way to raise the top is to raise the bottom.

The cooperative tradition this comes from names 7:1 as a maximum inside a federation. The number is less important than the three things having a number does. It makes the distance visible, which alone changes behaviour. It makes every raise at the top a decision about the whole body rather than about one person. And it removes the mechanism by which a body with an excellent charter slowly becomes an ordinary firm — not by any decision to abandon its purpose, but by a decade of individually reasonable adjustments.

This is a different instrument from The asset lock, and the two are often confused. The lock governs what may be extracted — capital out, sale, cash-out. The ratio governs what may be paid — the ordinary compensation of people doing ordinary work. A body can hold the lock perfectly and still stratify internally until its own members do not recognise each other; the ratio is the answer to that. Both sit under Capital Subordinate To Purpose and both are counted among Structural Immunity's explicit protections.

A Cell does not need a ratio. A Cell needs The Offering and honesty about hours. The ratio becomes live the moment a body starts paying people — a Community Company, a guild, anything with a payroll — and the moment to set it is before the first salary is agreed, not after the third.

Also called: Pay Ratio Caps · Compensation Scales And Ratios · compressed ratios Stands on: Capital Subordinate To Purpose · Structural Immunity · Dignity Opens onto: The waterfall · The asset lock · LUV · Extraction Of Wealth · Transparency In play: Home · beyond Sources: The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language — Synthesized, Economy and Stewardship and Structural Immunity (canon-grade lists; named, not articulated) · LUV — LIØNSBERG Units of Value (Cards; captured — names 7:1 from the FairShares Commons tradition) · Mondragon (wiki; the lineage) · The DNA of Heaven, Part IV (Fable synthesis) · lionsberg.wiki: Compressed Pay Ratios Open: 7:1 appears once, on a card marked captured, attributed to the FairShares Commons tradition rather than ruled for LIØNSBERG. No canon page sets a ratio as binding, and no page says at what scale the ratio is measured (a Cell, a Company, a federation).