While I support pay equity, will this simply cause secret renumeration to shift to bonuses/RSUs?
Or even more obviously: what if I advertise a sales job that pays only on commission?
You know the bonuses you awarded last year. Being transparent means you reveal that. Foo's salary is X, last year Foo received Y bonus, which was Z% of his then salary.
A sales job that pays only commission still has compensation data: the commission percentage per salesperson, the commission paid during the previous pay period. This tells you what you are likely to make, and if your commission is the same as others.
Who would take a sales job that doesn't list what sort of commission they'll be getting? And wouldn't average income from such a job actually be helpful if you are deciding to take it? Sure, it is wonderful if you get commission each time you sell a car, but if folks aren't getting paid very much per year, it probably means cars aren't selling as well as the what the "possible income of xxx.xx" is saying they are.
These are all things that can be disclosed and if they aren't, do you want to work in places that have secret formulas to give you pay?
I forget which Scandinavian country this is true for but I think there exists a country where compensation is a matter of public record.
I support this 100%. I want everything to be transparent here. I know where I stand skills and competency wise compared to my colleagues so I will be ok making less than those I am less skilled or less productive as. That being said I think I’m underpaid. A transparent pay structure will only benefit the employees as we learn in Economics: the more information about prices there are in a situation the better each actor can make choices.
It's Sweden.
Edit: more info in Swedish here: https://lawline.se/answers/ar-inkomstdeklarationer-allmanna-...
The tax you pay is public record.
For example, in Sweden, you can get a 'tax calendar' (a bit like an old-fashioned phonebook, but with total pay instead of phone numbers). You can buy relevant pages conveniently online.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxeringskalendern
It is a trivial division-by-twelve to determine the salary of your co-workers and neighbours.
Seems a bit like a way to persuade you to don't use it.
For large-scale scraping protection there are other options...
The newspapers publish lists of the richest 100 in each municipality every year. It's a yearly tradition, and there are no significant protests against it.
On one glorious day in 2008 the head of the tax office made them actually available online, and the system was DDoS'd by people snooping each other.
After that, the authority in charge of privacy protection declared that putting them online was a bad idea, and we have not had them since, but it was fun.
Very soon they realized terrorist groups like ETA or GRAPO used that information in order to extort, kidnap or kill family members of those that had high income in order to finance itself. Having access to that meant the ability to calculate the "revolutionary tax" for every entity with extreme precision.
So it was short lived, but on the Basque country they continued having access to that information because the political party that represented the terrorists had access to it.
Today travelling to places like Thailand or Mexico is extremely dangerous if they know you have money. They can kidnap your taxi driver, or put cocaine bags on you luggage.
I personally believe what I earn is nobody business but me and my family.
People have strong opinions about something they have never experienced, like socialism and communism. They really love those systems from outside, the grass is always greener on the other side.