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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.
Personally, I am in the private sector, but I don't care what others are getting paid. Usually a company will trot out the line: "well you are making more than the average so you didn't get much of a salary bump this year". I tell them I don't care what the average is, that is someone elses problem. And we are all making peanuts compared to the executives, so who cares what the "average" for the company is. Obviously "average" doesn't apply to C level.
minimum wage and 29 hours a week max for lot's of workers makes them look bad.
Here is a link to the buffer salaries. https://open.buffer.com/transp... It pays to be a hipster!
In Norway, EVERYONES salary is available and guess what, nothing bad happened.
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.
As a person with 30 years of experience, it seems likely that I make more than my boss, who only has 6 years of experience. In fact, by boss's boss once hinted something to the effect to me. So, is that unfair to the boss? We could debate whether he or I contribute more to the organization, or whether I'm worth X times what he makes. But that's irrelevant. Presumably, when my boss has 30 years of experience he likely also will make more than someone who has only six years of experience.
This is a bit like the union "seniority" system. Fairness comes not in terms of value-added per pay-received but in terms of the fact that ostensibly underpaid younger people will eventually become ostensibly overpaid older people.
You may disagree with the above, but what if everybody in this story knew each others' salary? I think that would just lead to a lot of bad feelings by those who feel they are underpaid (which was me in a past life), and wouldn't accomplish much of anything. It seems like a very bad idea to me, and not just because I'm now a highly paid senior person, but primarily because I saw the problems it caused among me an my coworkers when I worked at a Boy Scout camp at age 15: being young, we didn't know not to discuss these things, and when we discovered apparent discrepancies in our pay, it led to a lot of bad feelings.
Joel CEO 2010-08-01 New York, NY, USA $218,000
now, its tempting to assume this is a very reasonable regular salary for such a high position. you may even feel compelled to complement Joel on his humility, but dont. What isnt disclosed is Joels quarterly and yearly CEO bonus as well as his earnings from any assets he may hold in the buffer corporation such as interest from stock or dividends paid.
what the buffer corporation, and i suspect a large number of other more libertarian 'uber economy' minded corporations, are trying to do is get employees to compete amongst eachother for salary equity while ignoring the bigger picture: the control of the corporation and its assets are fundamentally outside their scope of influence. They participate in the companies performance and production, but gain very little from its successes outside their formal salary. The companies operational objective, for example, is stockholder value and not the greater good of providing gainful employment and retirement security for its employees. I also conject that 'open salaries' are a clever means of equalization for tech industries that are sick and tired of having to pay market price for talented IT staff and coders.
Good people go to bed earlier.
When U.S. publicly traded companies had to disclose top managers' compensations their collective compensations increased. Employers couldn't really screw them over. (Arguably, it was these employees screwing them.)
Capitalism/shareholders really can afford being squeezed of profits in order to pay fair market value for labor.
The problem is not that salaries are now open. The problem is that they were secret for so long allowing various forms of corruption to grow and fester. It is always awkward when previously hidden rubbish is exposed to the light. The solution, though, is not to go back to hiding salaries but to keep them open. That way existing inequities get cleaned up and new ones are not allowed to sprout.
I had a boss who made a big deal about giving me a routine 2% raise after I was with the company for six years. When I pointed out that I got a 50% raise after my first year and every raise since then was always 2% because of the salary cap, he got mad because I made more money than him for four years. Although we were coworkers for nearly five years before he became a manager, he thought he was better than everyone else and his paycheck proved it. That I made more money than him for many years didn't sit well with him. Needless to say, I got a job and a 40% pay raise at a different company.
family and friends seeing the information might make things awkward. Imagine the increase in loan requests from friends or the disapproving looks from relatives who think you should be "doing more with your life".
Especially if you tell your family you earn a lot less than you actually do, and spend the rest on hookers and booze :)
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I don't think that public employees should be under such scrutiny, simply because they are employed with tax dollars. I think that the state needs to be accountable, but that the information shouldn't really need to linked to a name. They should only have to report the position and salary of the person. They don't need to get so specific that you can tell exactly how much each person makes. Obviously some positions like "mayor" might be obvious who holds the position, but I don't see much of a point to publishing exactly how much every garbage collector is making by name. In my jurisdiction, they only have to publish the salaries of public employees making over $100,000.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
A company can never pay you what you are worth because they'd never make a profit doing that.
I think, he was telling me to that I should work for myself if I really wanted to get paid. I think he was right. You don't get rich working for somebody else. It's a good living sometimes, but after 25 years I'm not getting rich doing what I do...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
You are working for the tax payers, not a private entity with private interests.
Because private companies don't get money from the government? How do you think defense contractors make their money, from selling equipment to other private companies?
No, they get their money by leeching* off the taxpayer.
Any company who gets money from taxpayer dollars should be required to list all employee salaries and compensation, top to bottom.
* There are those who consider government workers leeches. If that is so then so are companies who exist solely because of government contracts or who generate income from government contracts, in whatever capacity.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Wow. You know... and I mean this in the nicest way, there are some decaffeinated alternatives that are equally tasty on the market.
The parent poster says that the average millionaire is based on dynastic wealth and it's not true of about 3/4 of millionaires. What he said is true of about 1/4 of millionaires.
About 95 percent of millionaires in America have a net worth of between $1 million and $10 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/books/...
A million 1950 dollars is worth $9,847,966.80 today. (CPI calculator)
However, the average wealth (net worth) of the top 1% is 19.1 million dollars. (IRS)
That's the wealthy elite.
4% of americans have a net worth of a million dollars or higher. But 3% of them have small amounts of money compared to the wealthy elite.
People can *easily* have a million dollars for retirement. I did. My mom was a high school drop out. My best income never exceeded low six figures and that only for about 5 years. My net worth is well over a million dollars. I retired at 51.
I think this article is more to the point the pp was trying to make:
http://inequality.org/selfmade...
I think he set the bar too low on wealth. That was my entire point.
It was not my intent to piss in his or your cheerios so take a chill pill.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.