States should ban contracts barring employees from seeking higher pay at a rival

How is that fair to me as someone who arguably deserved the higher salary? I knew more and played the market game better, yet because of my gender I then make the same as a less productive worker?

Salaries should be transparent and the reasons for higher pay should be merit based. I left that company immediately afterwards because another one offered me 50% more to do what the first company wasn’t even thinking of doing yet. So overall, I think the current system of secrecy and unjustified numbers is far from ideal.

I don't see why such a situation should need to affect salary transparency. It's also useful for employees to know the standards required to earn more.

() might be wrong here.

Everyone knows they make less than their boss, yet people don't bully their boss. Nurses know they make less than doctors, but they don't bully them. Adjunct professors don't bully full professors. So we can "handle" non-transparent pay when its built into job duties and titles, so it's not that much of a stretch to extend it to employees with similar job duties and titles.

The government sector already has transparent pay and ~17% of private companies have transparent pay, yet we don't see bullying there.

In fact, some preliminary research suggests employees feel more valued and feel their pay if fairer when there is pay transparency. When people don't know what their colleagues are making they tend to assume they are being underpaid.

If you're seeing mass bullying then you've got a problem that can't be solved simply by hiding salaries.

>think of what often happens to the best pupil in the class, where you have "grades transparency"

What? What happens to them? They get to speak at graduation?

The vast majority of adults are mature enough to understand that different people have different work outputs, different value to the company, and therefore have different salaries. We also are mature enough to understand that tenure and seniority are rewarded. We already accept that people get promotions at different intervals, and we already accept that only one person gets the "employee of the month" parking spot and spot bonus.

Luckily there are plenty. Salary transparency exists in all sorts of markets. Many US universities and public services publish. Finland and other Nordics have a lot of salary/tax transparency.

One really to interesting (to me) example is professional sports. Interesting because (a) sports has massive be pay discrepancies, to your point and (b) salary transparency is generally and employee/union "demand*. It's a demand for the reasons discussed here, transparency resolves an information discrepancy and improves athlete's negotiating position.

For US boxing there's a law mandating purse transparency, the Ali act. It was put in place to help boxers Vis a visit "promoters."

Apart from equalising negotiating positions somewhat, transparency will probably have other, hard to guess effects.

I wonder if the Finnish initiative has had any effect on market salary disrepencies, generally.

But... You can still know averages, and distributions and such. I am paid less than 82% of people/engineers at this company.

Besides that, you probably know more about your colleagues' contribution than anyone. That's the important comparison.

Apart from that, people are emotional, not stupid. We understand prices. People will live with being paid less than others. The transition will be emotional. There'll be a backlog of salary adjustments that will happen. We'll adjust though.

Last time I had a decision to make on a non-compete, I did consult with a lawyer and he basically said there are no guarantees, but generally a non-compete cannot be enforced if it prevents you from earning a living.

Edit: the article implies that places like McDonald's do this. I worked there (albeit years ago), and at that time it was not true. We would have been rightly laughed at if we asked for a non-compete on a minimum-wage job like that. It was hard enough to hire people who were reasonably well-groomed, punctual, and energetic. We would not have added unnecessary barriers like that.

The wealthy reap mnore and more of the benefits of the economy than the average person, in ever increasing measures.

The fact that a working class person might now have access to 4k TVs and new cars on finance doesn't change the fact that overall, their share in the prosperity of their nation in shrinking, even though it might seem like gradual improvement.

Luxuiries don't mean shit when you can't save, afford to treat a major illness or have to work two jobs to pay the rent.

Half of the US doesn't even have any savings and are in a state of persistent debt servitude.

As well, the absolute wealth of people does not stop discontent and violent revolution. The gap is what matters.

I think this trope is misused. Peasants are better off and the world is wealthier because of science, not a political ideology. The industrial revolution, scientific medicine, the green revolution...

Saudi Arabia's "peasants" (or descendants of herdsmen, properly) are wealthier because of oil mining and modern energy industry, not monarchy or capitalism or whoever else wants to take credit.

I'm not saying politics doesn't effect anything, it obviously does but capitalism can't just claim credit for everything invented in the last 200.

Btw, this is exactly what Lenin did and what Orwell parodied in 1984.

I'm not saying you can't argue that capitalism benefited the poor, but you can't just claim everything good that happened after 1800 for capitalism.

And study after study shows that humans very much define happiness in relative terms. It doesn't matter if quality of life is rising for everybody, if the gap is rising much faster - you're going to have the populace that is unhappy, and that unhappiness eventually translates to anger (it has already started doing so).

You can either work to fix that, or you can wait for torches and pitchforks.

    > "peasants" are enjoying the best quality of life in humanity's history...

BUT there's a whole lot more to the quality of life. Things like self-actualization-- the stuff at the top of Maslow's hierarchy.

People can thrive in all kinds of economic systems (capitalism included). However when a small number of people re-arrange "the universe" for their exclusive benefit, there's going to be a reaction to that and it won't be pretty. I think we should favor measured incremental adjustments to curb the worst aspects of capitalism over all-out revolution.

Banning employers from having a say in what work a terminated employee takes in the future is one such measured response.

Problem is, you can't sustain a large population that way, so civilisation has always used larger and more technologically advanced populations to push out smaller and more primitive ones. But that doesn't mean the larger and more advanced populations were necessarily happier.

Now life in general is absolutely better today than it was in the past, but that doesn't mean it's better for everybody in every respect. Peasants in the West may not get slaughtered by warlords anymore, but especially in the US, there are definitely poor people who struggle to make ends meet, and are slowly sinking deeper into poverty.

Peasants in northern Europe may be enjoying the best quality of life ever, but that's not true in many other countries.

The best system we've come up with so far is clearly regulated capitalism with plenty of protections for the poor.

You simply cannot have a system that needs consumers to spend money when its in every single companies best interest to pay as little, preferably nothing, to those whose business and expertise you need to survive. You can expand to other nations as a temporary solution but in the end you will run out of people to sell stuff to.

"Workers" do not show up on a balance sheet: they are neither an asset not a liability "technically." There may be a payroll liability briefly, though it will then be paid out and taken off the books. Accrued vacation is a liability, which is why we have "unlimited PTO" policies.

It is impossible, in double entry bookkeeping, to "increase assets and reduce liabilities." Every asset must be balanced with a liability. That's the fundamental basis of that accounting system.

To the extent that we're speaking metaphorically, workers are assets. To the extent that we're speaking technically, it's clear that you tried to apply jargon that you didn't understand to confuse others.

Where does that come from though? Is that still the case for the current generation of college graduates? Do the kids need to be educated closer to reality?

The notion of company loyalty is good for a productive workforce - UNTIL the illusion is shattered, which can take parts of the rest of an individuals positive world-view with it.