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Norway, the Country Where No Salaries Are Secret (bbc.com)
In Norway, there are no such secrets. Anyone can find out how much anyone else is paid -- and it rarely causes problems. From a report: In the past, your salary was published in a book. A list of everyone's income, assets and the tax they had paid, could be found on a shelf in the public library. These days, the information is online, just a few keystrokes away. The change happened in 2001, and it had an instant impact. "It became pure entertainment for many," says Tom Staavi, a former economics editor at the national daily, VG. "At one stage you would automatically be told what your Facebook friends had earned, simply by logging on to Facebook. It was getting ridiculous." Transparency is important, Staavi says, partly because Norwegians pay high levels of income tax -- an average of 40.2 percent compared to 33.3 percent in the UK, according to Eurostat, while the EU average is just 30.1 percent. "When you pay that much you have to know that everyone else is doing it, and you have to know that the money goes to something reasonable," he says. "We [need to] have trust and confidence in both the tax system and in the social security system."
I don't see it making it hard to justify a large salary, what I see it being a complication for, is large yearly bonuses for management, while the rank and file get shafted.
Generalized higher pay grades, even really obscene ones, would not really be an obstacle as long as they 1) pay their proper % of tax, and 2) have that income as a steady, constant thing.
It is when the managers make up fairy stories about how "We gotta do triple shifts or the company will go under! OMG!", pay everyone beneath them peanuts, and then give themselves huge, fat bonuses at the end of the year for "Doing such a great job!!" that people will notice it, and then raise cain.
I personally would LOVE to see this level of wage transparency in the US-- It would make a great many HR, and management teams break out in cold, bloody sweats.
Certainly, given the avoidance in the UK by Google etc., it would be nice to know exactly what all the corporates are [not]paying compared to their turnover in the territory. I say turnover, because there's less possibility of manipulation and it will give some guide to profitability.
Profit is easy to manipulate, in order to make tax liabilities disappear, yet the offending company still uses the infrastructure in the country. This is a point made by Warren Buffett, that well-known communist, not specifically by me.
That way, we know which companies to boycott. And yes, since you're asking, I have no FB account, don't buy anything from Google ads and am beginning to minimise my use of Amazon. https://www.hive.co.uk/ support local bookshops in the UK, for example.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
How is making your contribution to the public purse public anything soviet like? By keeping this information the shadows you allow the thieves at the big end of town to continue to allow steal from the rest of us. .
There is no such fact.
Everybody here is missing the other point: This global transparency ensures that people know their tax money "goes to something reasonable"
It totally keeps the rich, the government, etc., in check.
No sig today...
Wage transparency is great for so many reasons. As well as preventing the kind of abuse you describe, it also makes it easy to get a fair salary without heavy negotiation, and be sure you aren't getting screwed over.
As a result it also tends to drive down various pay gaps (gender, ethnicity etc). Some people claim that such gaps don't really exist, but the fact that they are reduced in countries with wage transparency disproves that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
- the only 'explaining' they 'have to do' is so that others can also try and do the same. AFAIC income and wealth taxes are robbery, armed robbery regardless if it is 100%, 50% or 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%
Somalia was tax-free for almost a 1/4 century; you should have emigrated.
If nothing else you'd have a much greater appreciation of both the value of taxation & what "armed robbery" is really like.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Let's see: 10% of 47 cents is 4.7 cents per dollar reduction. If we assume each employee costs $50K with benefits (probably low balling it), 12 employees would be $600K, which is 4.7% of your net income before taxes. That means your income before taxes is about $13 million and after taxes $6.8 million. So why can't you hire the 12 more now, especially if each employee produces more than they are paid, making you even richer? Are you having trouble making ends meet on $6.8 million a year?
Don't forget to figure in your health care costs. That's a service which most (first world) governments provide, using money paid by taxes.
...and any time pricing information is concealed, it's NOT a free market.
You know the only people who WANT a free market, really want one? Small actors who have no leverage. The BEST deal you can get when you're small is a fair one, as produced by a free market. Every large actor (the company vs you, at salary time, say) wants a closed market, so they can use their size advantage. The Company knows EVERY salary in the company (and they always want to know what you were paid at every previous job, when you apply) while you only know your own, at negotiation time. That's a huge advantage for them, which they always wish to preserve.
"Well, we'd really love to give you a raise, but we'd have problems if everyone saw how much more you're making..."
That is a Good Thing. If two people are doing equal work, one should not get a raise just for being more assertive.