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Open Salaries: the Good, the Bad and the Awkward (yahoo.com)
gollum123 writes: More employers, from Whole Foods Market, with 91,000 employees, to smaller companies such as SumAll and Squaremouth, are opening up companywide salary information to all employees. They generally don't disclose it to the public—but one company, Buffer, posts all employees' salaries on its website. The idea of open pay is to get pay and performance problems out on the table for discussion, eliminate salary inequities and spark better performance. But open pay also is sparking some awkward conversations between co-workers comparing their paychecks, and puncturing egos among those whose salaries don't sync with their self-image.
Everyone who works for a big enough organization has probably run into people who you have no idea how their salary is justified. I'm not just talking about "oh, I'm better than him because I know more," I'm talking about the secrets that confidential salaries can hide:
- Board members' less-than-qualified family members/business associates/friends getting paid a relatively huge salary compared to their role/contribution
- Senior level people who have been "parked" after a division closure or similar event -- often because they have lots of knowledge that would otherwise disappear, more often because they are politically connected
- Revealing how much politics really affects salaries would be a huge morale-buster.
The bigger the organization, the more these become apparent. For example, look at HP laying off 30,000 employees or IBM laying off 20,000. Most of it is probably offshore talent replacement in these cases, but I'm sure there are plenty of highly-compensated people left over from acquisitions, etc. that they're just taking the opportunity to purge because they were making a lot of money and not contributing a lot.
Some employees chatting about salary openness decided to take it upon themselves to do it. Someone created a Google Form and shared it on a very widely-used internal mailing list (~40K subscribers). People could choose to provide their username or not; many did. About 3000 employees added their data in 2014, which included career ladder, level, location, gender and base pay rate. For 2015 the form was revised to add "total compensation", because a significant part of Google employee compensation is in the form of stock grants and bonuses. Analysis of the numbers shows that compensation is pretty fair. There's no gender gap (not surprising because Google HR watches those stats closely). There are some significant differences between people at different locations, but those correlate pretty well with cost of living differences.
I think the difference between thoughts is that you are comfortable trivializing some of your tax dollars. It costs more money to scrub data and publish only salaries of X, and my taxes are high enough without paying for that too. If voters were all given the facts and all agreed to pay the extra expense to disclose only certain people's money then the people as a whole have spoken and I'm good with that.
Usually people are not informed about extra expenses and risks associated with not disclosing all expenses. There have been numerous cases of nepotism and cronyism where loopholes like yours are used to hide abuses.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
That's why I prefer contracting.
I mean, if you are going to get the same loyalty from the company as a contractor, and the same job security from a company as a contractor, you might as well get the BILL RATE of a contractor from said company, no?
And if you incorporate yourself, you get to write so much stuff off, if you do something like a "S-corp" you can save how much you have to pay in on SS and medicare (not paid on your full bill rate)....and you are free to negotiate your bill rate. Sure, you have to put on your Big Boy pants and do extra paperwork, think and invest for yourself for retirement, etc.
But really if you're going to be treated as a contractor, why not make the money a contractor gets paid for the risk undertaken?
These days, a W2 employee seems to get the worst of both worlds more and more...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........