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Comment by dennish00a | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting to read about this "taboo" because, as a scientist at a public university, the issue is...nonexistent! If you are a scientist writing grant applications with other people (the norm), then you need to know their exact salaries in order to fill out the application. This includes the salaries of people above and below you in the food chain. There is no mystery or taboo in it whatsoever. Working at a public university, the mystery factor is even lower, if possible, because all the higher salaries are published online.

I remember dimly when I thought this complete transparency was strange and it made me uncomfortable. Now I don't usually give it a second thought.

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Here in Sweden, taxable income for everyone is bublicly available. I always find it amusing/sad to read about this taboo in the US.

What do you mean? Can every citizen learn how much taxes has anybody else paid, including the incomes of the people outside the public sector?

Yes, you look it up on a website.

And in the past you could just call Skatteverket.

It's the same for Norway, all information is public. It does lead to salaries reaching some sort of equilibrium for the the same role, as it is much harder to argue against an employee, when he points out all his peers are making more money for the same work.

No. Tax information is public in anonymized form. That is different from wages, and the effect is absolutely not the same as if you knew exactly what your peers are making.

I'm trying to encourage talking wages at work, and have gotten my division to disclose theirs, but there's a lot of "oh, but it could lead to discontentment" in the rest of the company. And if you know Norwegians, being mildly at unease is the worst thing that can happen.

Yes, you can even order complete records over your region where you see everyone's income tax as well as their capital gains tax in Sweden.

As far as I know, there's no completely open lookup service on the Internet - all of them are pay-walled. None the less, they're public.

I'm fairly confident that this is common amongst the Nordic countries - albeit not looking exactly the same, they share the same spirit of openness.

That said, in Sweden (Which is the only one I have anecdata from) - it's still frowned upon to ask someone what they earn. Talking about what you earn or how much of a raise you got is also socially awkward.

I don't feel talking about what kind of benefits/subsidy is as socially awkward. I'd say it's more accepted.

Something that is completely socially accepted and frequent each year is talking about how large of a tax return you got.

Isn't it sort of taboo here too, though? I've seen people being told to fuck off for asking that question, or at least politely declined. Even my close family have always been reluctant to divulge their exact income to me, with a few exceptions. It's not a thing that I would ask someone without feeling pretty certain they wouldn't mind.

In general? Yes, it's still socially frowned upon (ie. Taboo) and socially awkward to talk about your salary or someone you knows salary in Sweden.

There are two issues: knowing and discussing.

In Sweden, they are separate. In US, they are unavoidably mixed.

It's the same in Finland, but people are still very reticent to talk about their salary.

Here in Australia, the majority of academics and university staff fall under union agreements with publicly available pay scales, so you can work out at least an approximate pay grade based on minimal information about the people involved. I also happen to live in the capital, where about a third of the working population is employed by the federal government, the vast majority of whom are covered by union agreements on standard pay scales. It's fairly normal to talk openly about being an "APS5" or an "APS6" knowing that many people around here wouldn't even need to look up the pay scales to know your salary from that.

I get the impression though that in general Australia has a fairly similar level of taboo-ness about salaries as the US, it's not something you really talk about with co-workers.

Here are the salaries for all University of California employees. https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/

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