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> less likely to ask for higher salaries and raises.

Of all the apologetics around pay gap, I think this is the one that many people could agree is the least fair. The company knows you're worth more, they can feasibly pay you more, they pay someone similarly skilled and talented more. But they do not simply because of a conversation at the very beginning of accepting a role (and once a year). Talk about an abusive angle. That's like saying to a child "Oh you could have got a PS5 and a game for your birthday, but you only asked for a new game for your ps4"... Employers should be seeking ways to retain talent and underpaying is a ticking timebomb.

The cost of rehiring is MASSIVE:

ad/promotion cost for the role(indeed), at least 100 hours of interview time (across candidates), 1/3rd the salary to the recruiter, 3-6 months of gradual training before they're "highly productive", losing 1-3 months of adopting team's productivity to training that person, losing the institutional knowledge of the outgoing person. Losing the opportunity of having a tenured person to promote into a higher level that is even more expensive to hire for. Not to mention the opportunity cost of the work that could have been done (eg if instead all those resources made your product better)

It's asinine to think someone would risk losing an employee over $20k when those costs above easily amount to 10x that.

> The company knows you're worth more, they can feasibly pay you more, they pay someone similarly skilled and talented more. But they do not simply because of a conversation at the very beginning of accepting a role (and once a year). Talk about an abusive angle.

is this abusive?

the company is not your friend, it is always going to pay you as little as it can that still keeps you working there happily.

agreed that companies tend to fail to adjust comp to actually keep people happy & working there, and in many places this leads to people leaving, but this I would say is exactly because the company doesn't know you're worth more

> the company is not your friend, it is always going to pay you as little as it can that still keeps you working there happily.

You're right it's not a friend, however this model sets up all kinds of terrible ethical games. Am I also going to happily work for as many employers and fake as little work as possible to collect many pay checks? See the arms race we're setting up by choosing to play entirely selfishly. (Which economics would call rationally)

From the discussions I've heard among C-level executives at a <500 person company, it's simply accepted that tech people will move to new jobs after a year or two. There's nothing they can do about it, they say, so we just have to scale up our hiring efforts! The thought that maybe they should do something to retain people is not taken seriously. No matter how many times I expressed concern about the potential loss of specific individuals with specialized (won over many years) knowledge of the codebase and the product, my concerns were always met with plans to scale up hiring—despite how little luck they'd had with those attempts so far. Last I heard, they decided to offshore, but assured us they would only accept the best of the best from [foreign country]. I ended up leaving also, so it's no longer my problem. :)

But negotiating is a part of doing any business. Lets say your roof starts leaking... you're willing to pay a lot to have it fixed because the consequences will be very bad very very soon... but you still call around, ask a couple of companies/tradesmen for the price, and choose the best price/performance one, while hoping there wont be any heavy rain before they're able to fix it.

If all of them said twice the price, you'd still have to pay... three times the price too. If it's something you're unable to do by yourself, and if not doing it makes it even worse, you basically have no choice. This applies in the same way to job openings.

The no-negotiating theory would just mean that employers would be fighting for women employees if they were indeed cheaper for the same work output, until the competition would bring the prices up to the men levels.

I agree the gender wage gap is generally an issue at the aggregate level due to individual choices.

I disagree with the language you use later in the comment (fought, won, given). Negotiation skills shouldn't drive compensation. Value to the company should. If someone is doing the same work and making the same value, then they are earning their salary. Differences in pay can be explained by documenting the difference in value that is produced - something they should already be doing in performance reviews.

These steps could help anyone negotiate. I'm not a woman and I was lowballed out of college due to a market downturn at the time and my salary has suffered ever since.

I'm a poor negotiator and started my career with a pretty middling salary at a big company in the Midwest. I also tend to get comfortable in roles and don't advocate for myself well or jump jobs often. What this adds up to is that I'm now mid-career and doing fine, but not making anything like the startling salary numbers you sometimes see mentioned here. But I don't blame anybody for it. Nobody owes me more money. Nobody was ever obligated at any point along the way to offer me more money than I was willing to take. I don't feel an injustice has occurred that needs to be righted by legislation. I don't believe I "should" be given more or that I deserve it in some kind of cosmic, abstract sense.

The status of my salary has an easily articulated and understandable explanation. Nobody did anything wrong and nothing needs to be done to correct it (by anyone but me).

You're right. But you're discussing a separate issue. This issue is not about comparing yourself to the starting salaries at other companies. It's about how your pay compares to that of your coworkers, and if the pay practices take advantage of labor (specifically by gender). Are the current new hires at your company making more than you? Even if it's explainable, does that make it right?

What I'm saying is that I object to the "pay practices take advantage of labor" framing. I very well might be paid less than some of my coworkers. If that's true, it's still not the case that anybody took advantage of me. I mean, not in any sense greater than when you buy something you think is worth more than you paid for it and feel like you got a deal. We all "take advantage" every time we buy something for a price less than the maximum we'd be willing to pay.

I recognize, for what it's worth, that this is not a popular intuition (even though I maintain that it's the correct one). People get similarly outraged when they learn about price discrimination schemes, which I find entirely unobjectionable.

The difference is the power imbalance due to the company keeping information secret. When information asymmetry exists, the party with less information is at the mercy of the other.

Your example of products being purchased is a completely different paradigm due to many reasons. The consumer information is available to the company through many avenues such as market research and affiliates. The company generally conceals the cost of producing an item. The scope and duration of the transactions are also majorly different. Let's also remember that the price for the object is the same for everyone, yet you are offering different pay for the same value to the company. That's the problem.

If we really want to go full capitalist libertarian and let markets decide everything, then let's do away with all the protections. I don't want to live half in one system and half in another. Why should we have protected classes or offer accommodations for disabilities? I think you'll find the answer also supports other workers rights, such as the ones being discussed/proposed here.

> Negotiation skills shouldn't drive compensation. Value to the company should.

What percentage of the per-employee revenue do employees deserve? Negotiation is the way of establishing this, and 'value' is only one part of the equation.

Similarly: price of products on the market are not established based on how valuable that product is to the buyer. That's only one factor.

I understand the appeeal of what you're saying, but we don't have many good examples of it working well.

Perhaps the best way to do raise is through collective bargaining - a union.

Yup. Why do you think there is such hostility to them?

A lot of them are really corrupt. In slovenia, unions are very friendly with some political parties and unfrieldly with others, and the "other" one proposed a tax change, which would basically lower the income tax by raising the zero-eth tax bracket level (progressive taxes, 0% for first X eur, then 16% for the next bracket, 26% for the next,... X was to be raised). This would mean that someone earning minimum wage would pretty much pay zero income tax... the unions were against the proposed change, because this would mean that the government would get less money.

That's fair. Unions can be corrupt in the US too. If they get greedy, they can take down the company (manufacturing can only compensate up to a certain point depending on international compensation).

I have started believing in unions more over the years because I work for a company that is well known for doing the right thing and caring. Yet, I've repeatedly seen the company break its own policies and screws people over. So I feel the issue is pervasive if this is really a "good" company.

It could be that contracts without a union could fix my main complaint - not consistently following the rules. But the only way to force this is through legislation or unions. Unions seem to be more feasible.

We were a communist country (yugoslavia) and there were always unions here... but as with everything, all the union leaders were in the party, and did what the party wanted them... same with the company directors... so yeah.

But it's funny, because a lot of left parties here (even the ones with the red star in the logo) are always saying that we should tax work less, and tax capital gains more... but then the "other party" does that, and they start protesting (probably because they hope to be in the government after the elections, and want the money to steal for themselves).

Basically, the only solution for our government is to take them on a vacation with a plane somewhere, like with the polish politicians - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster

I remember hearing about a union in China and thinking the same thing - how the union is basically government run instead of run by the members.

In the US, for years the corruption was organized crime controlling the labor unions to extract money for themselves mostly through "protection" from them starting strikes.

I mean.. technically the unions here are independent... but we all know which way they lean. If it was an organic movement, voulounteers and all that, then sure. But with the amount of money they get, and the amount of work they (don't) do, for me personally, it's not worth it.

>What percentage of the per-employee revenue do employees deserve

While this may vary from company to company and even job to job surely all employees doing the same job deserve the same per cent.

You wouldn't give one salesman twice the commission because he's a 'superstar'

> To emphasize the importance of negotiation: several friends of mine told me their bosses said they could have started with nearly double their starting salaries if they had negotiated better, so this aspect makes a huge difference, at least in engineering.

Which clearly means that equal work doesn't pay equally. Surely your colleagues did not do half the work of those who negotiated a higher starting salary? In fact, mandating equal pay for equal work would take care of the negotiation aspect. The tricky part of course is how to measure work accurately.

Unless you’re on an assembly line, there is no such thing as “equal work”. Several of my colleagues and I share the same title, yet the women with that title objectively produce less than the men and absolutely deserve less pay (at my company).

Is that because of sexism? Or because we judge the individual, not the gender?

This seems like a backdoor for Socialism where this backwards logic is used to justify paying everyone the same rate and so people who are massively productive end up subsidizing those who are useless.

>people who are massively productive end up subsidizing those who are useless.

They already do, you are subsidising owners/shareholders a lot more than you'll ever subsidise your "useless" colleagues.