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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!
- 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
But it would go a long way in calling bullshit on an employer who tells you no on a payraise because " budgets are tight " all the while paying each of their execs a yearly bonus that exceeds your lifetime income.
This sort of transparency would cause a great deal of discomfort for those companies who regularly lie to their employees.
In fact, those companies would find it difficult to keep any employees and, in the end, might have difficulty being a company at all when all of their talent leaves because of it.
The Income Inequality gap in the US is so wide now, this level of transparency would likely cause a great deal of anger at best.
An insane amount of violence at worst.
As the article stated, it used to be that everything was completely open and searchable on the internet for a few years, before that point you had to visit city hall (or the post office) and manually search through huge books.
The current setup is actually very nice, in that the transparency goes both ways:
In order to be allowed to access any tax records you first have to use the same two-factor authentication you would use to deliver your own tax return, and if you then look at any tax return except your own, the person you looked up will be notified that you did so.
I.e. if I think my neighbors are spending too much money and want to check what they have declared, they will immediately be told that I did so.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
The reason it's in the current news (at least on the BBC) is that the BBC have recently published the salaries of many of their top earners for the first time. The discussion has arisen because many are earning in the millions and are effectively paid from the public purse (well, licence fee but all the same in the end...).
Original article
...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.