>Why do you think that would be "profiteering as your main motivator" to have as a general principle that as you scale your work you also scale your salary? I'm not sure how that follows.

I'm in 100% agreement with you. So you do pay less to those who work 4 days a week. That's fine and it makes sense. Just confirming.

Then I don't even need to ask: you're also saying that for every hour over 8 hours staff is paid overtime? That would be consistent with paying 4-day a week folks less. And would be the nail in the coffin that profiteering isn't your main motivator.

No, we don't pay overtime. There hasn't been a recent decision about that, so it's more a historical artefact at this point, but my rationale for not paying overtime (apart from the fact that it's uncommon to get overtime pay as a full time employee in the UK) is that I don't think overtime should be encouraged in any way. For the same reason we don't allow people to sell their (30 days) yearly paid holiday allowance back to the company - the days are there to take them, not to trade them for a bit of extra pay.

If I'm understanding your argument right, I think you're saying that because we try to evaluate how much people should be paid in a rational way that includes some assumptions around time being correlated to amount of work, that means we are "profiteering". I'm not sure that's worth dignifying with an answer, but here goes:

GrantTree is a business. We need to make a profit in order to continue to exist, to grow, to be an exciting place to work, to have the resources to invest in our people, to be able to develop new products, and so on. We also need to compete against other businesses in the same market, some of whom are quite aggressive. If we get the balance between people's contributions and their compensations wrong, we'll be uncompetitive and won't survive. It's that simple and has nothing to do with profiteering.

I commend the decision to not encourage overtime, and in the UK that probably doesn't take much pleading for you to achieve. I've lived and worked in France and worked closely with most nations around the world including the UK.

Ultimately from your description it sounds like the increased non-profiteering wages would not come out of company profits. Thus in the end it's just like all the other businesses then. No need for all the flowery language about how there's other priorities than making money. If you had to ditch everyone and go to Malaysia to "be competitive" then you'd do it.