All arguments against salary transparency seem to be that people will be unhappy when they find out that the company has screwed them over and therefore it's better for these people to be ignorant.
Salary info is a very small piece of the information needed to evaluate the fairness.
The article details quite extensively how difficult it is to communicate the totality of information in all but a few circumstances. If everyone could see every piece of relevant info then I'd agree.
One example: my value to the company may be for something you see as worthless. But you don't have the full strategic roadmap of the company's leadership in mind when you devalue my contribution. And the company may have valid reasons for not making the strategy widely known in the company. If you learned that I got a big raise for my success in that area, you'd feel slighted. The problem there isn't lack of info re: salaries, it's the impossibility of every employee having every bit of info needed to make the assessment.
I’m not saying this is easy, or without pitfalls, but the biggest reason I’m for transparency is that it helps protect against unfair salary discrepancies.
What markets function like this? I have no idea what the cost of growing, harvesting, shipping, and selling a banana is. At every step of this process there are capital investments, labor costs, and profit margins that are totally opaque to me. And yet I can look at the price of a banana and decide if I want to spend the money or not. One beautiful aspect of markets is that not everyone has to spend years researching every purchasing decision. The makert sets a price for you. If one company has margins that are too high, another steps in to take some of that profit, by offering at a lower price until it reaches equilibrium.
The job market seems similar. I don’t know how companies set their offer price but I am capable of evaluating offers all the same.
That would be the equivalent analogy. That you know you are paying the same price for bananas from the corner store as everyone else.
Right, but that mechanism is only possible if information is public. You don't know about the pricing of growing, harvesting, shipping and selling bananas - but it's possible to find out, and a company looking to enter the market would find out. You can rely on market pricing because the market lets you outsource your research to other market participants, but that only works if research is possible in the first place.
Largely because somebody else out there is doing it on your behalf in order to make a buck.
Without market transparency you wouldn't be able to rely upon this happening.
I like the privacy of my coworkers not knowing my exact compensation, it is not their business. If we follow your logic to its natural end, why not force disclosure of all expenditures each of us make as well? (which on another topic, that is the best reason to never have digital currencies)
This is a great point, and let me add that it becomes 10x worse when money is involved. Some (many?) people are just flat out irrational when it comes to money. Jealously and envy quickly block any rational thought when it comes to explaining why someone might make more than they do.
If team cohesion breaks down because pay information is revealed, give them pay cuts for being petty and disruptive. This is not an unsolvable conflict. People are not advantaged by remaining ignorant of their status in a transaction.
>I like the privacy of my coworkers not knowing my exact compensation, it is not their business.
It is their business to conduct the business of the company which employs them, which includes the distribution of that company's funds. Maybe people in other companies don't need to know, but people in yours do, because it is their business.
The floggings will continue until morale improves.
You can even reasonably guess someones salary based on their job and location, especially a coworker's.
Precisely the people with hard-to-guess salaries may value that privacy.
- an insurance company demanding a premium because you're well paid
- competitor bidding for your labour anchoring their offer to your current salary
Those are just two cases were it could be harmful. The idea is to make the information available and transparent while still not making it public and still protecting it.
I'm not a bad actor, who spends all their time figuring out how to make profit off of someone else's private info. I'm pretty sure there're very creative ways private information (salary and not) can be misused, but I don't want to find out by volunteering this information.
Why do you assume someone making less is being "screwed over"? Imagine employees A and B. B greatly outperforms A and therefore rightly makes more. However, A is delusional about his skills and thinks he is as good as B. Pay information is made transparent and A sees he is making less. This makes him mad because by all rights he ought to be making as much as B! This type of comparison/resentment might make A want to quit or ask for a raise, whereas before he was both content and fairly paid at his performance level.
If someone is in an executive position, and something like you describe happens, it is their fucking job description to resolve the problem. Meanwhile, by having open salaries, everyone has the information needed for a competitive market. Including college graduates, who get screwed over routinely
//Edit: Oh, and if A ever DOES need to find a new job and advertises his "delusional" skills, either him or his next company will feel the pain from the lack of price information here
> saving the company money
Without measurements how can we can say who is delusional, A or B? Ultimately transparency benefits everyone except those who currently non transparently draw greater wages without justification.
People will adopt their attitudes, there is no place for immaturity and ego in a professional context.
No, seriously. If A is getting upset because he feels he's not paid "fairly", but A isn't contributing enough to get paid more, then someone needs to tell A exactly why he's being paid less. And if you can't explain why, then you need to reconsider that decision very, very carefully.