A Rootin' Tootin' Separate Thread about making individual salaries public knowledge
Powerpuppies
drinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered User regular
drinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered User regular
Arguments for:
Arguments against:
- It sucks for one person to get paid $100k and another person to get paid $200k based on how aggressive they were in negotiating when they took the job
- It gives high-performing employees who are low-compensated more leverage to seek a raise [counter: making salary ranges public solves this just as well]
- It makes it easier to spot discrimination via salary
Arguments against:
- It makes a performance review public - If Joe and I started at $60K 4 years ago and now he's making $75K and I'm making $65K, I don't want my performance to be public knowledge
- Anonymized HR audits using demographic data can detect discrimination [counter: aren't the people who would be discriminating the same ones reading the audits?]
- It breeds resentment for individual coworkers - knowing the guy next to you makes x amount isn't a healthy work environment
- Publishing salary data isn't going to lift up the low end. It will being everyone to the low end, and then give people who the company wants to pay more different job titles.
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I'm ok with this. If the employee gets a title which fits their actual job for why they're being paid it's being up front about it. they shouldn't hide the real reason they hire people on staff.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Perhaps you could look at those to see what problems arise, if any.
i think like everybody agreed to this instantly and we moved forward to an area where we actually disagreed
I think we just don't know very much about them. One of the reasons I wanted to rootin' toot was so people who know more would educate me
Gotcha.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Am I hiring you for your negotiation skills? Yes, then good god why am I trying to negotiate with you! Take the standard salary and raise/bonus schedule as everyone else.
Well I think there's room to be more transparent about things without standardizing it so everybody gets the same, save seniority. I'm comfortable with the idea that performance is rewarded with higher pay.
I considered writing raise/performance/bonus schedule, but I thought it would be confusing. Yes, performance should be a metric in pay.
Performance is often intangible, though a solid performance review system can go a long way to qualifying the intangibles. No review system is perfect, but having a good one is better than having none at all.
If you don't have a robust performance review system and try to implement performance metrics first, you're going to incentivize the wrong behaviors.
So I guess publishing salaries presupposes that you have a performance review system in place, that it has been in place long enough for people to accept it, and it is directly tied to compensation.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Would you feel disaffected if your co-worker with skills XYZ made more than you on a project only requiring the XY skills which you possess?
This is a very typical situation in my field as project requirements flutuate, and Z skills come at a modest* premium but tend to not see as much demand.
(IE: not so large a premium that it's worth laying them off between Z jobs and hiring another XY in their stead.)
In my government job, every job title has an associated salary range. You generally come in at the low end, you get guaranteed annual raises until you hit the salary cap, and then your salary stays there until unions lobby for salary hikes. I really see no serious downsides.
Instead of rewarding people with raises, you reward them with promotions to higher ranking job positions that pay more money. That becomes the chief metric for performance - if you're good at your job, you're elevated to a position with more responsibilities. Yes, this doesn't work as well at smaller companies, but I still think public knowledge salaries would work fine.
I guess everyone knows if you have a bad performance review based on your salary? Then again, I've never worked in a place where it wasn't pretty obvious who was doing well and who wasn't. People talk. It happens.
And if you see that you're making less than Bob for doing what you assume is the same job, you should absolutely be able to being that up with your boss. Further, he should be able to defend that discrepancy. If he can't, he's a shitty boss. And if you can't deal with a perfectly good answer, you're a shitty employee.
Andrew makes $500k in sales per year, but he is kind of an asshole. Brian makes $400k in sales per year, but he is nicer and coaches some of the junior team members.
A robust performance review system might say that "positive attitude" is 10% of your review, and coaching juniors is 20% of your review, and sales figures are 50%. The other 20% are other metrics not important to this example.
Andrew gets a 5/5 on sales, 2/5 on coaching, and 3/5 on attitude. Brian gets 3/5 on sales, 4/5 on coaching, and 4/5 on attitude. They get the same overall scores, so their compensation is equal.
Now imagine the same situation without a quantified performance review system. Andrew finds out he makes as much as Brian and vice versa. Andrew is pissed because Brian "is a shitty salesperson." Brian is pissed because Andrew "isn't a team player."
A good boss would be able to say "look, we need both of you. We need people like Andrew to push the hard sales, and we need people like Brian to internally develop the team." But that is a conversation that can easily go awry, and if it isn't phrased exactly right will be interpreted as favoritism.
If you've already quantified those factors and discussed them with everybody, then discovering salary discrepancies is a little less of a shock, and difficult discussions about them already have some groundwork.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Of course, they don't do the same for their contractors! Loophole!
After the whole Snowden mess, he found out what that particular contractor had been paying it's employees. Who did less work than he did, with weaker skillsets.
He had been pushing for a raise for awhile (great performance reviews, but "the money isn't in the budget right now"). Comparing what they were paying outsiders to do the exact same work, or even less, to what they paid internally was an eye opener for him.
He was pissed. No longer works for uncle sam, as a direct result.
So don't give me that 'the government does it and it's fine', that's bullshit. I could go on a rant about contractor shenanigans for hours.
Seems to me that this is how it should be. That's kind of the point of making salaries public knowledge.
And he 'changed' things by quitting, and getting employment............at a contractor. For almost double the salary.
He had a good fucking laugh at that one.
Your anecdote supports more wage transparency, not less
Someone said the government 'does this already' and I chimed in to call bullshit on that. It's not a good template for what needs to be done.
I dunno, usually in my experience, it's not a secret when someone isn't doing well. Just because you don't see their exact salary doesn't mean you don't already know that their performance is lacking. To go a bit further, how does making the salary public display their performance to everyone?
To be fair, I also work in a public sector job where my salary is 100% public (county level) and I intend to stay in the public sector, so I really don't have any issues with the public seeing salaries. I'm also used to the same system with relatively normal (frequent?) promotions (going from a I -> II -> III of the same job title and then a Senior or so on) that ElJeffe described above.
Individual salaries of rank and file workers do not need to be made public. Full stop.
But the positions SHOULD have publicly known, acceptable salary ranges that HR must adhere to.
If a company has less than 100 employees, there is not enough of a population per position to openly publish metrics on where people fall on the salary range anonymously. If there are only three Jr Data analysts, putting three dots on a graph is going to cause problems. People will come out of their meeting and not be able to hide the fact that they had a gangbuster year and got a great raise when their cubicle-neighbor complains about the terrible compensation increase that year. It introduces a significant amount of unwanted social strife. But if there are 2 dozen people in one position, you can release fairly anonymized data samples of what the average pay per position is, and what the low and high range is in reality.
If you are a company with tens of thousands of people or more, you should be expected to do this not only by position, but also by gender, race, etc. - at least in the short term while this remains a pressing problem.
But at every step along the way and at all levels of work (outside of positions on publicly traded companies that myst disclose compensation), the individual's salary and compensation should remain undisclosed to anyone outside of HR/Mgmt and the person being paid.
In short - I do not think there is a good catch-all for this problem, and different solutions are needed at different sizes. I have worked in small companies where, had salary info gotten out, things would have gone south really quickly.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
ah. I'm for banning them.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Re: Govt. Contractors. Now there's an interesting element to the topic at hand.
In general, I think contractors pay what they pay because they felt it made their bid is competitive. What they pay, therefore, is pretty sensitive information as their competition can looks at the task, look at the rates, then try to form a pretty good idea of what they need to bid to beat the other guys.
Obviously this already happens from time to time, often tragically where they fail to complete the task and we all lose. Removing the guesswork could help them undercut less dramatically, but it could also encourage it to happen more often.
Public salaries could also mean, for a small contractor (and even the big boys who are just a vast collection of semi-autonomous project teams, large and small), that a few respectable raises could very well sink the whole ship, because it would be immediately known to their less generous competitors. You could see a situation where CorpA employees get denied raises based on CorpB's payscale, and get caught some weird compensation freeze stand-off. Pay raises based one's own shareholder whims seems bad enough, and while the race to the bottom is endemic of a different problem, public rates could exacerbate it.
In the general sense, this would seem to make contractors more competitive. Something which those of the common view, that of contractor waste and abuse, would find to be a good thing. But for the people who do not service billion dollar task orders, it is already quite competitive, and the 6 figure sums they fight over don't really have room for waste and abuse.
I'm open to the potential for a net good, but public salaries would certainly make things interesting in the military industrial complex.
http://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2015-160.html
Of course, Companies would be required to report the pay ratio disclosure for their first fiscal year beginning on or after January 1, 2017. So that's a ways form here, but up until now, only in IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) was it required to disclose the compensation of key personnel within the financial statements, instead of just the addendums to the financials (which investors seem to ignore for some reason). So the dialogue is definitely shifting in favor of more disclosures, not less.
The arguments that salaries shouldn't be disclosed internally when they're now being furnished to outside investors is definitely going to be watered down in Companies where the "public" is actually the public, and not just internal users.
Those are not even close to being comparable. Your insurance claims, saving and sick days use should be private, like all the other ways you spend your salary.
That's not a problem. The whole point of making salaries public is to compensate for the asymmetrical information during salary negotiation.
I don't care about how many sick days you use, I just want to make sure I have some too.
In the US those policies are illegal.
Just, like so much bullshit about US law, there's no punishment for having such a policy. They just can't fire you over it.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
nationally or by state law?
i always thought it was just state law
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm entertaining anonymized public disclosure. I just assumed: Job title | rate | EOE Data would be sufficient for whatever greater good.
Your co-workers would know who was who, but beyond that you'do just be a data point for stats majors to chew on.
(Not entirely comfortable with it from its value as agregate PII, but we're in hypothetical land, so whatevs.)
Sometimes it makes me want to bang my head against the wall seeing the people making six figures or close to it when they are worse than useless - they actually make less get accomplished by their presence.
It frustrated my wife when she was promoted to manager, given more responsibilities, yet still made less than her predecessor who - by every single metric - should have been making less.
Still, knowing that gave both of us stronger negotiating positions when it came to reclassification. It doesn't really make that much of a difference though, beyond looking at other positions throughout our university and knowing right away about what we could expect to make if we changed jobs. Probably saves a lot of time all around.
National. It's not explicit, but it's part of the National Labor Relations Act, which gives employees a right to "concerted activity for mutual aid or protection". Which has time and again been ruled to include discussing salaries.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
So all your men make the top of the range, all your women make the bottom. And no one ever knows.
Why?
The only reason you seem to have given already happens. People already evaluate their coworkers contributions anyway.
I've heard there's it's specifically protected in periods where they are not "on the clock", so during lunch breaks or coffee breaks, etc.