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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite fortunate that I work for a company that's very transparent about pay now, but I've worked at a few places in the past where sharing your salary details was considered a serious offence. Obviously the point was to maintain paying as little as possible. I occasionally wonder what would have happened if the payroll database had ever been leaked, or if there was a leak from HMRC (UK version of the IRS). I strongly suspect it would have been the end of the company as a lot of people would have walked out.

You'd think that risk would have been enough to equalize the wages a bit, but it definitely wasn't the case at any of the places I experienced. I guess the existential risk is less of a threat than the cost savings are a benefit.

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That information is under pretty tight lock and key in the UK, perhaps for specifically this reason. I'd say the risk is pretty minimal.

Yeah only ransom and kidnapping. In France a guy was kidnapped by mistake because he was jewish and his smart kidnapper thought all jews were rich. He died.

Now at least with such a list the risk of mistake is minimal, only genuine high earners would be kidnapped, is that what you're saying?

Now imagine you share it with criminals. Do you imagine a few creative ways to use such a list ? That's what Albania did.

Most wealthy people are by having your own business and the end of year revenue/profit bilanc is already public.

Doesn't law explicitly allow sharing this kind of data?

US law does. That may or may not be the case in the UK.

My contract (in the UK) explicitly states that sharing compensation or bonus details is considered gross misconduct, which is a dismissable offense.

This looks like a typical lie that employers like to put into contracts, and it seems it is: https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/09/can-your-boss-stop-you-talkin...

Well, it's not a lie that it's in my contract and that I signed it.

It is true that this clause is there in your contract, sure. But the clause itself is a lie - it’s void, because it contradicts the law, yet it is there, to make an impression that it’s not void.

There is no specific protection for it, but at the same time it also cannot be forbidden to be discussed. Employment protection in the UK is string enough that you cannot just fire someone for discussing it.

UK: you may discuss your pay to see if there's any discrimination (gender etc). (Maybe in other circumstances too, I'm not sure)

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/77

There is no "the law", you'd need to be specific about which market you're talking about.

I don't know. I've never needed to talk to a lawyer about it thankfully. If it is something that's explicitly protected then plenty of companies are getting it wrong.

Not the OP. I believe that's the case in the US, but here in Canada, there generally aren't any laws against it. There was a bill in Ontario in 2018 that banned reprisals against workers who discussed their pay, but it died when the governing Liberal party lost the election and the Conservative party did not follow through. As far as I know, the practice is not banned in Alberta either.

In the US, it’s only on a voluntary individual basis. For example, an HR employee that knows all employees pay information can be prohibited from sharing that information but cannot be prohibited from discussing their own pay.

> Obviously the point was to maintain paying as little as possible

Is this the only reason one would want to withhold disclosing everyone's salary?

Full disclosure would likely lead to one salary for every person in that role. But anyone that's spent any time in a company knows that not everyone is the same. I would hope top performers get paid better than mediocre or below average employees. And if everyone had all the info, that would open up huge legal liability due to the perception of bias.

There would also be complaints and comparisons across roles as well. There's also the privacy component.

I think the idea of pay transparency but in practice if you dump everyone's salaries it would case a disturbance and a huge cultural shift in an org that didn't disclose salaries before.

>Full disclosure would likely lead to one salary for every person in that role.

Why? We have existing systems with full transparency (e.g. CA state employees) and this proposed trend has never come to pass

I'm in the US military, and although there isn't a public spreadsheet with a line for "warner25: $xxx,xxx" you could work out my income if you knew my rank, years of service, location, etc. along with how our pay is structured. Most people outside the system (i.e. my parents and extended family) wouldn't work this out easily, and probably think that my income is much lower than it really is. My co-workers, on the other hand, could probably figure out my income down to the last penny. I think this arrangement doesn't cause strife for two reasons that don't apply to most citizens in the private sector:

1. We knew the deal (how we would get paid, and that it's public knowledge) when we signed up. It's a not a leak.

2. Even if some higher paid co-worker seems like a clown or worse (toxic and counter-productive), we all know exactly what it takes to reach that same level of pay... i.e. a well-defined and generally attainable combination of years, education, certifications, and experiences to get promoted. So you don't need to pay everyone the same amount for the same role, but you do need this kind of deterministic structure.

It seems like number 2, in particular, has no equivalent in the private sector where pay is based on fluid market competition and negotiation and the whims or biases of hiring managers.

Airlines pay just like that (as do taxi companies and most other parts of the transportation industry). Guess what you all have in common? Zero agency. So when you take a job where the ideal output of your labor is 100% deterministic, then it makes sense for your pay to reflect that.

Good point. I was thinking about white-collar knowledge workers but you're right that this exists for many private sector employees who get paid by the hour or have a union.

I met with some SF city officials a few years ago to discuss a program that our company was going to run for the city. I've never interacted with a less competent group of people, and we withdrew our proposal simply because we were scared of being affiliated with them in any shape or form. Looking back on what happened to the city since then, it all makes sense.

I wonder if the full transparency you're talking about is a part of how the city managed to attract and retain such talent pool. I know that for all of my career I've been worker harder than my peers and have also been compensated accordingly. If someone told me "oh no, [person who I know is less productive] has the same title as you and he never comes late to work, so you can't make more than him," that for sure would have been our last conversation at work.

I don't know why most companies don't want to disclose salaries, but every startup I've led did that in order to pay more, not less. You basically look for the most exceptional talent in the world, and then you pay them every last penny you can afford. Same with retention - you want to promote people based on what the market would pay for them, regardless if your current org structure allows for a title promotion (you can only have one senior leader per department at any given time). If I had to disclose everyone's salary, that would only lead to more constraints with being generous on my end, not less.

Seems like a good reason to establish a proper performance evaluation review process, with a clear scale for bonuses and salary increases.

This makes it fair for everyone and reduce the possibility of biases by the managers.

If someone finds their salary unfair, then both the employer can argue more precisely why or why not.

> I would hope top performers get paid better than mediocre or below average employees.

What if those top performers aren't aware of their worth and/or aren't good at negotiating their salaries within that market?

I've heard about plenty of oblivious people who had existential crises when they discovered that those around them made much more money than they did, even when they were good at what they did, or had been at the company for a long time.

It's definitely a multi faceted issue! Of course, one might also take the role based approach: "In company X, the employees in the role Y are compensated in a range from Z to W, here's an anonymous histogram. Here's some metadata about how the length of employment is positively/negatively correlated with earnings."

I don't have illusions that companies would actually be interested in doing anything like that, because although disclosing salary ranges for a job position is now mandatory in my country, you still see something like 2000-5000 EUR ranges which are almost meaningless (due to how most people will hover around the lower end as far as the actual compensations go).

> I would hope top performers get paid better than mediocre or below average employees

We have bonuses for that. No need to deceive people into taking less than others. Bonuses also have the advantage of being tied to your actual performance, while giving a rockstar salary to a new hire won't guarantee you better performance than other employees paid less for the same role. Or you could have salary ranges for roles. What's always unexcusable to me is lacking transparency and gaining competitiveness by deception.

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