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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?
I think this is a variation of Dunning-Kruger. Lower-paid workers cannot understand what value the higher paid workers actually provide. Sometimes the higher pay is valid, sometimes not. But unless you are already an expert, you won't know. So while you help with race/gender pay inequality, you're also making a hostile work environment for managers and subordinates.
Three possible outcomes:
1- You feel undervalued
2- They feel undervalued
3- You're surprisingly in alignment on the value of the work both of you do, your initial negotiating position, and other possible impacts that may have led to your compensation.
I'd guess most people are not going to fit into the third category.
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.
The idea of keeping wages secret exists mainly because employers don't want everyone knowing what others make. If they did, they might all want to be "more equal" (deservedly or otherwise). For the most, the secrecy is still a tool employers use to maintain low wages.
Transparency puts the onus on employers to explain wage inequality.
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.
My company told me when I was hired (buried in some document) that salaries were considered trade secrets, and we weren't allowed to discuss them. I don't know if they have any legal footing there, especially when discussing them within the company. Also, we've been acquired by another company since then, so I don't know the current policy. But in any case, you may risk some retribution from your employer if they find out you're sharing salary information (potentially forcing them to pay more when the underpaid workers find out).
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.
it's "impolite" because we're told it's impolite. We're told that for a reason. It's yet another barrier to Unionizing and organized labor; the only two things that have ever made a widespread enough difference in the working classes quality of life to result in a 'middle class'.
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Double your income when speaking with 'workers' you'd love to see quit and women you want to fuck.
Halve it, when speaking with competitors, in hope that they will think raises are impossible and move on.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Either you make a lot (relative), and you get to brag.
Or you are getting underpaid and you need to know that when you negotiate your next salary.
The business owner doesn't want you to tell your salary, but remember they already KNOW all the salaries. They have all the knowledge and are trying to keep you ignorant and underpaid.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It's not my fault if someone is a shitty negotiator.
Nope. No one is ever happy. If you make less, you're pissed. If you make more, it's not enough more, and you're pissed.
Your employer benefits from the information asymmetry of not sharing your pay data with your peers. You do not.
Unfortunately no-one wants to be the one that speaks first.
... and you have the keys.
Just sayin'.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
$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.
That's great and all, until Trade Unions, just like any other person or group of people given representative power, inevitably transition out of acting on behalf of those who empowered them, and start acting on behalf of only themselves.
I, along with a number of people in my class, did six co-op terms at IBM and was hired by the company. One of my classmates asked me what I was making and I told her - it turned out to be $25/month more than she was.
She complained to her manager and almost ended up getting fired.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
When I first got to Europe, I was *shocked* to see a spreadsheet on a network share that everyone could access, that listed everyone and their salary, vacation, the works. I mean, ZOMGWTFROFLBBQ!!1!
After I settled down and removed my underwear from my head, it started to not be such a total freak-out.
By the time I returned to the US, I thought it was really shady and lame for folks to be kept in the dark, never knowing for sure if they were getting what they were worth.
In the end I actually preferred being out in the open, that also sparked honest and frank discussions about who was worth what, why so-and-so got more, etc. If you're at the bottom of the ladder, you deserve to know if you're getting screwed... And if you're a seven-figure exec, you better demonstrate your value or you got some unhappy staff on your hands. I really, _really_ wish we could adopt a modern approach and shed the whole "Ebenezer Scrooge" hush hush system that clearly was designed to benefit only those at the top.
"The mind is a terrible thing to, um, uh, oh bollocks." -- Me
Google also has no leadership and has devolved into a high tech Lord of The Flies society.
Surely you mean Lord of the Files.
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In every company there's someone that makes more than you, but works less.
Conversely, there's always someone that makes much less than you and works much harder than you.
From someone else's perspective, you are one of those two people.