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Ask Slashdot: Should You Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Make?
An anonymous reader writes: Asking someone how much money they make is often -- if not always? -- considered impolite. But over the years, there has been a movement in toward more salary transparency. Some say salary transparency can make workplaces more equitable by helping to eliminate the gender and racial pay gaps. Even in companies that haven't decided to officially make all salaries open, some employees are taking matters into their own hands and sharing their pay rate with their coworkers. What's your take on this?
The province where I work has mandated that all university employees paid over a certain amount must have their salaries publicly disclosed because they are, at least partly, publicly funded. While I don't have a problem with this per se I think it is unfair to single out those of us working at universities. This rule should also apply to all companies who accept government contracts too since, by extension, their salaries are also being paid for, at least in part, by government money.
Actually I think it should be done in a way that protects privacy, but the privacy-protecting entity must NOT be under the control of the employers. That's what's wrong with such websites as GlassDoor.
Let me try to reframe the question from a higher perspective: You can't know if you are being paid fairly without valid data on what other people are being paid for similar work. However you cannot know the truth when the underlying objective is to lower your pay (and all the other employees' pay) as much as possible.
Or in philosophic terms, there needs to be a balance between the needs of the customers, the employees, the managers, and the corporations themselves. As things are evolving, the cancerous corporations are running roughshod over ALL the human participants.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
YMMV:
In my experience, Fortune 25 companies don't have fixed salaries for positions or roles, but rather pay the least amount possible within a range. For example, the salary range of a lead professional at my company is $70,000 - $121,000. That's a pretty big swing.
I took a paycut to get into this company, and a few years into it, I gathered salary data from my peers (within my professional grouping only), then assembled a short presentation for my manager - our performance is metric driven, with quite clear revenue, margin, scope, and customer satisfaction expectations - showing that my professional output was near the very top, and my pay was near the very bottom. He didn't even realize - and I think most managers aren't intimately familiar with what their employees make.
But the data helped me negotiate for a higher salary, which I wouldn't have been able to do if I didn't have a federally protected right to discuss it with my peers.
Your position is a key piece of information when negotiating, a piece that Americans almost never have because of this custom. The only reason you should WANT your salary to be a secret is that you think you make the most compared to your peers. That or tax evasion.
Your salary is never "secret". It is likely your boss and all the superiors up to the CEO and all the people in HR and payroll know your salary and besides it is reported to the IRS.
The question is simply if you want your salary generally known to your colleagues so it can be used for their advantage in negotiating their salary. This is a question that can be partly answered with game theory.
Unfortunately, game theory tells us that lying is dominate strategy. If others are honest, it makes sense to lie since you get the same benefit without any risk. And if others lie, you have nothing to gain and honesty comes with a risk. Therefore, everyone lies.
So rather than put every in the position of wanting to directly lie, out of politeness we offer everyone the opportunity for a passive lie of omission.
$125/hr - was my last billing rate before I retired at age 42. I was a consultant, paid hourly and was taking about 8 weeks off a year.
I always billed for every hour, period. The client sent me to a conference and I billed 8 hrs a day. The flights back home, the client's policies prevented me taking a 1st class seat which cost less than a coach seat and had better connections. I billed 16 hrs that day when I could have been home in 6 hrs had the 1st class seat been approved ... on a commuter jet.
I got a new boss, who tried to suggest that I should only bill 40 hrs a week but work more to be a "team player." I pointed out that he was asking me to violate US labor laws. Seems he'd asked all the other contractors in the group the same thing. I was limited to 40 hours, which suited me fine.
My first "real" job paid $3.35/hr ... washing dishes at Big Boy. I got fired.
My first salaried job paid just under $30K/yr - about $14/hr - but it was common to work 60+ hrs/week, which dropped the hourly average pay drastically. I ran the numbers and promised I'd try to minimize "exempt employee abuse" the rest of my career.
Worked at a 100 person company in the late 1990s. Found a spreadsheet with all the salaries, bonuses and stock option grants for everyone in the company. I copied the file off and took it home - studied it. It was very fair. I wasn't "highly compensated" at the time, but managed a small team of software developers. The option grants made perfect sense based on who not only worked the hardest, but who provided real results for the company. A few of my team had 3x more options than I did. They deserved it. I was paid more - not too much more, but more. The company hired a new President who was given options - like 40x more than I had. His prior track record was impressive, but he failed completely at our company. He left after about 11 months, 13 months before any options vested. The sales team had terrible salaries, but huge bonuses and some added options when they made a sizeable sale. About half the sales team made huge money yearly. The other half earned below the poverty line. Marketing guys would ruin my team's schedules, holidays, vacations constantly. The sales guys were always fairly demanding when at a client location, with good reason.
Oh ... and I've never lived in NYC or anywhere in California.
Sure, pay is hard, particularly if you don't have a job that can be directly attributed a share of receivables.
But what makes you think the people currently deciding salaries *are* experts working with current, valid information? Why should we assume that the status quo is "correct" in most cases, as opposed to being subject to the same limitations you note as applying to open salaries? If this is something you can easily train many people to do we could just offer the same training to employees, and if it's hard to learn or do we shouldn't assume that all managers magically have the skills and knowledge to make it happen.
And why isn't this "hostile work environment" a problem for all the places that do have open salaries, like every government and union shop in the world?
Well, if you can do anecdotes, so can I!
Transparent salaries aren't a problem anywhere I've worked. That includes local government, public university, and state government. And private industry, although they were a fair bit less transparent there.
In none of those cases did I find a hostile work environment related to salaries. Most of the people I've worked with have been well-adjusted, down-to-earth people, and generally wouldn't raise a stink unless there were some real shenanigans going on. And in general, there weren't any, because of the transparency.
I don't know what psychopaths you've spent your life working with, but it sounds awful. Where have you worked and in what fields? I'd like to avoid those if I can.
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