A Study On The Piece-rate-pay Phenomenon Of The University Teachers’ Wage System In China

Scanning the development process of higher education in China during the past six decades, it appears that reforms had never been disappeared. In this continuous wave of institutional changing, university personnel and distribution reform is absolutely the mainstream. From1952to2006, the wage system of university teachers of our country had experienced transformation from early days of dual wage system to a Soviet-style grading system, structural wage system, professional technical position grading system and post performance wage system. Those reforms were paid off, but far from effective, one of the problems that receives the most concern is, the assessment mechanism for teacher’s performance is excessively quantificational and to some extent teachers are paid by piece-rate.Piece-rate system as a high-power incentive wage system, theoretical studies reveal that under certain circumstances it can fully motivate the workers’enthusiasm, reconcile interest conflicts between employers and employees and save the cost of monitoring workers. However, as the effort input and the quality of output of teachers is hardly could be observed and measured, whether piece-rate pay is applicable or not would be an interesting problem and worth studying.As to the phenomenon of piece-rate pay in university teachers’wage system, this paper confirms the existence of this problem based on some empirical evidence, which is followed by the analysis and explanation of the problem with the using of the analytical instruments of contractual theory. This research indicates that, as a productive contractual organization the university is, when it can not effectively measure and identify teachers’ labor input and the quality of the their output, the execution of piece-rate contract will lead to the opportunistic behavior of the teachers as agents who maximize their own revenue, that is, the quantity-quality tradeoff, which would bring about the "academic bubble" and the reduction of the quality of teaching; On the other hand, the principal-agent analysis in this paper proves that, in the situation of incomplete measurement of the quality of the teachers’output and existence of uncertainty, piece-rate contract is the optimal choice of the supervisor of the university as the principal who faces the excessive quantificational incentive of the current university evaluation system, this provides a reasonable explanation to the ubiquity of the phenomenon of piece-rate pay in university teachers’ wage system.Finally as the policy recommendation, this paper argues that a kind of elastic package pay that based on the independent evaluation of the teachers’incumbent contribution may work well.