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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

I read somewhere pay transparency just lowers the amount of pay for disagreeable people who try to earn more. It makes things cheaper for businesses in general because it's harder to get a rise.

Nobody has ever been able to define what equal pay for equal work means because every human being is different (skills, work ethic, ease of working with them, timeliness, negotiation skills, assertiveness, leadership ability etc. etc). So I can understand businesses playing it safe and just paying everybody less than trying to keep people who are good but more demanding of higher salaries.

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>I read somewhere pay transparency just lowers the amount of pay for disagreeable people who try to earn more. It makes things cheaper for businesses in general because it's harder to get a rise.

Then wouldn't you see businesses fighting for it instead of against it?

What people think will happen is often different from what actually happens.

Who knows what’s going on, maybe we should just pay everyone the same and let the state decide what goods need producing and how resources should be allocated. It will be fairer right?

business arr run by people and each individual person would like their salary to be as high as possible so no if this is true then no individual has an insentive to support this and it so business would not support it

How do you know whether businesses are in favour or fighting it? Or what if they appear to be fighting it while they're secretly lobbying for it with their EU contacts?

A trend I noticed from all the EU regulation concerning business: you can be certain it will look like it's doing good for people and bad for business but it will just end up screwing common people and small businesses in favour of big businesses.

Think about VATMOSS: great, now Amazon can't charge Luxembourg VAT to customers in France BUT small businesses need to keep track of every EU country VAT, apply it and retain 3 pieces of evidence of the customer location. In practice, small business killed their eCommerces and moved to Amazon or just swapped their payment processors for Paddle (which charges way more but handles VAT for you).

Think about GDPR: it was a money transfer from people to lawyers and businesses are still doing whatever data transfer they need just by adding more text to their EULA which nobody reads.

We'll see how this one goes - but it makes sense that more transparency will have a chilling effect on the cost of high performers who know how to negotiate.

GDPR, like its predecessors for many years, has a substantial compliance requirement which of course costs businesses money. It also however creates a level playing field, most well-run honest businesses would want to comply with these rules (e.g. customer phones up, you have their address wrong, you fix it) but GDPR makes it an obligation for the shady outfit they're competing with too.

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