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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

It’s an interesting idea as it would make compensation transparent and eliminate a lot of unfairness.

In public sector, your salary is posted on a website. Everyone knows what you make, and thing like women and minorities getting paid less don’t happen. Outliers are known.

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For real life experience with this, see reports about Norway, Finland and Sweden. For instance https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panama-tax-nordics-idUSKC... (random Google hit)

In Finland, tax records are public, but only top lists are published. To see records not on the top lists, you have to visit a tax office and view records on their terminal—no copies can be made, but you can take notes.

Note that at least in Norway only the high level numbers are public, like adjusted income, taxes paid and net worth.

These can are not really income etc as it depends on deductions which can change them a lot.

Public sector salaries are publicly available not because we have a right to know how much you made, but because we have a right to know what we (as taxpayers funding government) are spending.

This is just an extension of the same idea: if I have a right to know I paid $2 of a $50k/year public servant, I also have the right to know that my neighbor didn’t pay $0.

> thing like women and minorities getting paid less don’t happen

Not really, you just make sure all the women and minorities get the poor paying jobs.

There’s huge difference between public salary and public total income.

There is, and that information is also public, at least in my state.

What this does is remove the ability of the employee to negotiate and possibly get a higher wage. Companies will love this law, because they will just pay everyone a lower rate (no negotiating).

Even if you are better or have more experience at a certain job, most companies won't want to deal with public pressure or employee jealousy.

If you look at the wages of Norway for instance, they are almost all the same across the board over multiple industries.

You have effectively removed the wage gap, by making most people poorer. This doesn't sound like a good thing to me. Why can't we remove the age gap, by investing in education and helping people earn a better living? Why does it always have to involve taking money out of the pockets of everyone else?

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