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Google Staffers Share Salary Info With Each Other; Management Freaks
Nerval's Lobster writes: Imagine a couple of employees at your company create a spreadsheet that lists their salaries. They place the spreadsheet on an internal network, where other employees soon add their own financial information. Within a day, the project has caught on like wildfire, with people not only listing their salaries but also their bonuses and other compensation-related info. While that might sound a little far-fetched, that's exactly the scenario that recently played out at Google, according to an employee, Erica Baker, who detailed the whole incident on Twitter. While management frowned upon employees sharing salary data, she wrote, "the world didn't end everything didn't go up in flames because salaries got shared." For years, employees and employers have debated the merits (and drawbacks) of revealing salaries. While most workplaces keep employee pay a tightly guarded secret, others have begun fiddling with varying degrees of transparency, taking inspiration from studies that have shown a higher degree of salary-related openness translates into happier workers. (Other studies (PDF) haven't suggested the same effect.) Baker claims the spreadsheet compelled more Google employees to ask and receive "equitable pay based on data in the sheet."
I firmly believe that when job-hunting, you should know how much you'll be making when you apply. I've been through a number of interviews for what seemed to be great positions, only to have to turn them down after being offered the job because they weren't paying a decent wage for the job at hand.
Making public how much everyone is making goes a long way to keeping job-seekers aware of how much they are worth. Hiding salaries only helps companies, who can then keep low-balling people.
Back when I was in the Army, we all knew exactly how much everyone else made in base pay, from E1 to O9. That at least gave incentive to work up the chain from the bottom.
You do realize that 'perfect information' is one of the defining characteristics of the idealized model of 'free market' behavior? You don't have to like it; but calling anything vaguely related to money that displeases you 'socialistic' is dumb beyond words.
In the US, at least, they can't prevent it. If people want to talk about that, let them do it.
Yup. Same law that says you can unionize says they can't stop you from sharing pay and benefits information. But like unionizing, this is a powerful tool for workers and they will do anything they can to keep you from asking.
The employees know that the skill diversity exists. Everyone does. That is not the issue. The difference is that, if both sides of the negotiation have all of the information, then both sides can use the information to an equal advantage. The parity is not between employees, but between employee and employer. You are trying to make it out like the parity issue is between employees. The issue is merely that employers hide the information because it gives them an information advantage.
If everyone knew all of the information, the negotiations across the board would naturally be more equitable. To answer your specific question, the three others know that a specialist will demand more than them. They may try to argue that they deserve equal pay, but the manager can simply point to the fact that the specialist is a specialist. Everyone has all of the information, so it is actually *easier* to see fairness _when_fairness_exists_.
If you click through to the "article," you'll get a long list of ten-word sentences formatted as tweets. When did this become an even remotely acceptable way of presenting something?
Good lord. If you work for Google, can't you figure out how to create a blog? My mother did it.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Many prices are open in public. If I want to know the prices my competitor offers, I just look up his price sheet. But for employees, appearently having a public price list is frowned upon, which gives employers an unfair advantage in the negotiation. Differently than the employee, the employer has perfect information, he knows how much he pays every employee. And thus the power in salary negotiation is very loopsided, as the employee has much less information about the market and the competition than the employer has. Thus salary negotiations in most cases don't happen in a free market environment.