will, in turn, provide as little effort as they can get away with. Many companies, nevertheless ,still stick to the archaic, counterproductive goal of trying to minimize compensation. Though it may seem to be cost effective to apply the profit-first mentality of low-as-possible wages, it ultimately impedes employee performance and engagement and damages the bottom line. Opposition A fundamental criticism of performance-related pay is that the performance of a complex job as a whole is reduced to a simple, often single measure of performance. For instance a telephone call center helpline may judge the quality of an employee based upon the average length of a call with a customer. As a simple measure, this gives no regard to the quality of help given, for instance whether the issue was resolved, or whether the customer emerged satisfied. Performance-related pay may also cause a hostile work attitude, as in times of low customer volume when multiple employees may compete for the attentions of a single customer. Where a customer has been helped by more than one employee, further resentment may be caused if the commission is taken by whoever happens to make the final sale. Macroscopic factors such as an economic downturn may also make employees appear to be performing to a lower standard independent of actual performance. Performance-based systems have met some opposition as they are being adopted by corporations and governments. In some cases, opposition is motivated by specific ill-conceived standards, such as one which makes employees work at unsafe speeds, or a system which does not take all factors properly into account. Employers can use these compensation schemes to extract as much labor from their employees as possible, effectively working them to exhaustion and into an inevitable injury in order to maximize productivity. Even worse for employees, baseline productivity rates and other variables in these particular performance pay structures are set, altered, and ultimately controlled, often subjectively, by the employer. By setting unrealistic performance expectations, employers can effectively raise productivity and lower wages simultaneously by shifting the blame of an unfair system with impossible incentive milestones onto their employees, claiming employees are simply not meeting the minimum performance thresholds to earn the additional compensation that makes the substantial effort required under these schemes worth it in the first place. Under other, more company-specific pay schemes, the employer defines a particular workload to an employee, forcing X amount of hours