Do you mean every company or everyone?
The reason I don't want to share my tax return is that it reveals my income. The last time I revealed my income it created a lot of negative relationships.
The reason I don't want to share my tax return is that it reveals my income. The last time I revealed my income it created a lot of negative relationships.
People ask for a lot of fixes to say, pay inequality between men and women, but I think transparent salaries would go a long way and are a fairly simple mechanism. I have very rarely made the experience that pay inequality, if properly justified, was taken the wrong way.
Market transparency is good!
Frankly, I am not that interested in what others are payed. This is something I can negotiate with my boss myself and isn't my business for other people. And I don't want others to know about my income either. You can be sure that people will judge you by your income and feel superior if they make even 10 bucks more. Even your friends might get jealous about your income.
Some people see a value in discretion and some people do not. I belong to the former. There is just so much baggage attached to that shit that it isn't attractive to me at all.
For modest earners, their public income can become a kind of super credit rating; it can gate access to some businesses and services, or establishments that want an aura of exclusivity, like social clubs. In effect it can make it harder to jump levels on the ladder.
For high earners, their public income can lead to gouging and an unwillingness to discount. A car dealership or a contractor might use it to gauge price sensitivity.
I'm sure there might be complicated social outcomes too. Would dating change in a world with transparent salaries? Would neighborhoods and neighborhood diversity? For the worse, or better?
In most cases it ended up skyrocketing as a result. CEOs could see exactly what every other CEO was on when negotiating. Meanwhile boards didn't want to pay under market rate and be blamed for cheaping out if things went wrong.
That's the wrong intention and not what I described in my post. Maybe in those countries CEO salaries were non competitive or too low compared to the value that a CEO provides. I explicitly said that I see transparency as a mechanism to rationalise salaries, not make them more egalitarian everywhere.
But where I think it without a doubt will have an equalizing effect is between people doing equal work but being compensated differently. That effects ordinary workers more than extraordinary talent.
Try it, it's fun! You get more leverage that way.
Why? With coworkers who were jealous?
No, in laws and neighbours. Mother in law assumed all tech is paid the sams: poorly. Because her son is paid poorly for his IT job. So when I bought a house that was significantly larger than hers, the relationship changed. She felt lied to all these years.
I also made the mistake of speaking to a neighbor forgetting that everyone comes from different walks of life. So my house that will be paid off in 7 years with one income was "a humble purchase" while my neighbor and his wife are apparently struggling to keep their house with two jobs. I felt awful about my misstep in words. Really a slap in their face.
Although with those friends we've danced around the income part enough that we know the general income range of each other. I had a situation with work co-workers where we were all the same level and years of experience and we shared salaries, and people got a little salty over <$500 / yr differences.
It could also be that Waterluvian had a low income and that affected his relationships.
Or it could be that it just differed in a direction (up or down) that his peers didn't expect or appreciate for whatever reason.
I can think of a lot of reasons revealing my income would affect various relationships I have (whether that's a good thing or a bad thing isn't relevant), even though I wish it wouldn't. Information about money does change the way people treat you.
When I was a kid, people knew my family wasn't doing so well and I'd get lots of well-intentioned charitable offers from friends and friends' parents that just made me feel really bad about myself, so there's one way that having a lower income revealed can affect relationships in an apparently positive way that's still uncomfortable.