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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.
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.
In the case of contracts, the amount of the contract should be made public, but how the contractor pays its employees is really their own business. All the public needs to know is the amount of the contract, and possibly, competing bids to ensure the public is getting a good value for its money. The employees of the contractor are not government employees.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
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'
If you are in the US your employer is in violation of federal law specifically section 7 of the national labor relations act, where discussion of salary is a protected act.
https://www.nlrb.gov/resources/national-labor-relations-act
RIGHTS OF EMPLOYEES
Sec. 7. [Â 157.] Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all of such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 8(a)(3) [section 158(a)(3) of this title].
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-qa/pages/prohibitdiscussingsalaries.aspx
... 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.