Two people qualified for a position both get the job (two openings). The job is only worth a certain amount to the company so they both get the same pay.

Both are qualified but one is much, much better than the other. The slower one gets a perfectly acceptable, maybe even very good amount of work done in the allotted time, the company is happy!

The other worker gets the same amount of work done but in only 20 hours of time each week. (This isn't hypothetical, I've seen it play out many times) But they still only get the same pay. And, as it turned out, the company hired two people to do the job because there's only two people's worth of work to do (at the expected normal pace of the slower worker)

What's to be done? What is a fair solution here? Does fast worker slow things down since there's absolutely nothing to be gained from working faster, and they'll otherwise look lazy for half the week doing northing? What do they owe their employer, who made an agreement with them to do $X amount for $Y dollars with the expectation that it would (and normally does) take a person 40 hours to complete.

I don't see an equitable solution here that says "Faster worker must find more work to do at the same pay rate". That is not a meritocracy. But the idiosyncrasies & cultural norms of modern working conditions don't allow a worker to negotiate with an employer in terms of "Hey Company, you say that block of work is worth $100k over a normal work week. I'll take the $100k but it will only take me Monday & Tuesday to get it done, but that's great! You get what you need much earlier and I won't even ask for more money!"

No, instead we're fixated on the concept of a 40 hour work week as a on-size-fits-all model. And I can't for the life of me understand why a more talented worker should have to give more value per unit of time to their company for the full 40 hours a week without additional compensation, except for the fact of the social construct rooted in our collective sense of workforce norms.

Hell I've even had it happen to me-- not claiming I'm a superstar, I don't work twice as fast or anything, but some things I'm a little faster at. Early in my career I worked in a department that had a slow current workload. The only available tasks was catching up writing some end user documentation, something a senior colleague (but not a supervisor) expected to take me the rest of the day. I'm a decent writer and a decent technical writer though so I was done by lunch time, screen shots, annotations, narrative and all. done, handed in.

So I had nothing to do. There was no work, at all. So I opened a web browser and poked around some interesting site, only to have that colleague see me and proceed to ream me out as though I'd committed some horror. In front of the entire rest of the work group. It was one of the most infuriating and embarrassing moments of my career, and completely unjustified because even after all of that she could only make vague gestures in the vein of well find something!

It's ridiculous. If companies are-- understandably! --not going to pay higher performers more for the same job just because they get it done faster since they have ample other "normal speed" workers who would take that place, there's no reason for them to do it, but there's also no reason the employee shouldnt be able to say "hey I did what you pay me for so I'm going to got do this other thing.

Try to distance yourself from the idea that employees are signing on for a 40 hour work week: there's no verbiage of the sort in my contract. Once you separate that from the equation it becomes a negotiated exchange for the amount of labor needed to get the company's expectations of the job done, and if that's 20 hours instead of their expected-normal-capability-persons's 40 hours why should a person owe them more?