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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.
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.
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.
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