That's why I am for salary transparency. These issues would go away quickly if people knew what everybody else is paid.
I hear this a lot from well-paid tech workers. Just two days ago I responded to a comment here where someone said the solution was for people to "just negotiate better". Right.
That's why I am for unions. Get professionals to negotiate on the workers' behalf, and have everyone agree on precisely the factors (experience, etc) that should be used for determining salaries. Then nobody is dependent on either the goodwill of their employer or their own bargaining skills for a fair salary.
You’ll understand why I’m suspicious. If this worked reliably, why would anyone need to file a lawsuit over $400M in lost wages? Wouldn’t the company have just fixed the problem when they first saw it?
Unions exist in fields and countries where wages are more transparent, too. Transparency is necessary, but not sufficient. That’s why we have a free press, but also elections and courts.
You don't depends on them but on an individual basis you can point this out and often you can correct this for yourself. They will still try to screw other employees. And yes,unions are a good way of ensuring this doesn't happen.
Instead they should get a competing offer, that pays way more, and actually leave the company.
Visas are easily transferred between companies.
Corporations have professionals bargaining on behalf of the company. Every solution I hear that doesn’t involve professionals actively bargaining for the workers is putting them right back at the mercy of the company.
Long story short, when the whole thing came out, imagine their surprise, (and delight), to discover a class of workers who would happily work for cheap. The big, BIG bosses proceeded to demand that everyone take a paycut. (Well, everyone who was making more than the average.) So a whole lot of colleagues ended up leaving and looking for other jobs etc.
In the end, it didn't really help the people on the bottom at all. I was just a lowly intern, but that experience definitely taught me a lesson about how the corporate world works.
I guess I never thought about it that way.
That's pretty weird. Usually the bosses know what everyone is making or can find out. Looking at cost is one of the main duties of a boss.
From my experience you can go to management and tell them that you think you should be paid X. If that's within the normal range you often get the raise.
At my first company in the US I was told that everybody is making as much as I was offered so I said yes. After half a year I found out that most people made 30% more. I talked to my CTO and told him that I want more and I got more than 30% without much hesitation. I wouldn't worry about asking for more. They won't fire you.
With that said, you should always be interviewing for your next role, as you will never get a salary bump at an annual review near what you would make switching jobs. Always Be Interviewing. You are looking out for you first.
It’s not clear whether that would lead to them negotiating for more money.
The flipside, which is largely why I am not in favor of legally enforced salary transparency, is that you ask for the salary range, they say $90-100k (or whatever), and you can justify why you should get 100 or 105 or 110 with examples. Or you can ask for $90k because you're happy with that and know you won't price yourself out of the position, or any number of other possibilities.
It just makes the entire process much less flexible, which I know a lot of us developers love, but in the business world it doesn't make much sense.
In general, you would expect salary negotiation to be worse for any given employee, because they have limited tools to research with compared to the hiring company, and far more limited (man) hours to do that research.
I would also imagine negotiation still exists, but now more emphasized on the extra benefits, eg PDOs, medical plans, bonuses, etc.
And ofc the added negative that the company can hide unfair practices, eg underpaying particular groups, or hiring someone's kid for 2x the pay, or whatever.
The main negative is that someone who was skilled at salary negotiations now makes less, but presumably most people aren't skilled, making it more a net positive. The biggest concern tbh is if the whole industry was overpaying its workers due to the fog of war, and this suddenly cleared things up, and employees across the board take a hit
But then one senior developer would claim that they are better or different than every other senior developer, and negotiation would return. Sure, Tim might be willing to accept the average rate of $95, but Jim worked as a staff engineer at Google, and so on.
No, keep the Government out of this.
Nowhere with open published comp numbers has ever come close to my comp. Maybe it would work better as a system if everyone was opted in but the current data points I see don't support higher salaries for people with my skillset.
As a general economic principle, I can't really see any situation where this information asymmetry works to the benefit of the workers. It might benefit some employees in critical positions that can bridge the information gap and gain an advantage over their peers.
But on average, no, transparency reduces the leverage of the employer; else they wouldn't fight to maintain that information differential, they would promote full transparency in order to pay everyone less as you say.
How do they go about this? Through means accessible to individuals?
It's a good question how the data is obtained. Maybe through mutual data sharing agreements in exchange for access? Anyway, I've see such reports for my country, with very detailed breakdowns for job types, seniority, broad technology area, forecasts etc.
Shrewd people can get this data, especially if they're willing to pay for it.
Every company pays in a bit to cover the costs/overhead with putting together a market report, and also submit the job titles and salaries of their workers. Possibly more data too, but I'm not certain. E.g. time with the company or years of relevant experience would be very handy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-02/equifax-h...
But companies aren’t just trying to maximize performance, they are also trying to minimize pay. It’s a lot easier to give someone a 20% raise if the starting salary is 50% lower.
Some people are underpaid because they don’t know how much they are worth, especially people from backgrounds where nobody makes this much money. Some people are overpaid because they are friends with the boss.
If a company is capable of paying $200k on average, salary transparency may make it harder for them to recruit people who are worth $500k. I’m paid a lot more than any company with a salary transparency calculator I’ve seen pays someone with my job title and experience. So I’m not going to try to work for those companies. I get the impression they are underpaying their employees, but their salary transparency allows them to recruit people who used to be even more underpaid.