Ex-Google Employee Exposes Unequal Pay With Spreadsheet
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/21/ex-google-employee-exposes-unequal-pay-with-spreadsheet/
My employment contract bars me from sharing my salary & bonus details. How about you? Do you know what your coworkers make? Do you even want to know?
My salary is public record. Has been for several of my jobs. I don’t care and I’ve never looked for my coworkers’ info. Though these are not jobs you’d go into if you were chasing a high salary so it wouldn’t surprise me if none of my coworkers knew or cared about others’ salaries.
I have a general idea because I speak with headhunters, but I do not have the exact number of what my colleagues make. I don’t think I would really want to know either, as long as I am happy with my pay.
i don’t know and I don’t particularly care.
Like romani, my salary is public record - and many of my coworkers DO care what others in our unit make. It’s been the source of a lot of friction at work.
We are able to access a list of salary ranges at each level on our corporate website. But I have not been told which level I am at. (I can guess…). I would love to have transparency.
If I knew that someone doing the more or less same job as I was earning a lot more than I, I’d be very very upset.
Would u still not care if women & minorities of equivalent experience were getting significantly less?
I know what my pastor colleagues earn. It is considerably more than I earn because I serve tiny churches. Workload is about the same though.
The denomination is constantly calling for justice for workers around the world but not for their own pastors.
We can be fired for discussing our wages from the home health agencies for whom I moonlight.
H’s salary is also public record. Our local newspaper actually published a link to a site where you can put in anyone’s name who works for the state and see title and their salary.
This issue has been a constant source of consternation for DH for the past 10 years or so because of his current employer’s lack of transparency. Salaries are supposed to vary to some extent based on the amount of business you bring in. However, he knows there are a number of long term older employees who are not pulling their weight and he’s certain that they are being over-compensated. It makes him nuts and if he saw the actual salaries and bonuses they were drawing just “because,” I think he’d flip out. It’s not a good scenario.
No good can come from knowing what someone else makes.
I believe federal law prohibits barring employees from discussing salary with each other. They can stop you from discussing it when you’re on the clock, but you do have to be allowed to discuss it.
You can also look up sites like glassdoor for salary ranges at companies.
It annoyed me no end not to know at least the range of pay for jobs I had. I suspect I was underpaid for my position in many architecture offices. It had nothing to do with how much you brought in. We were all drawing at about the same rate, but if you can’t ask what other people are earning there is no way to know if you are being cheated.
The ranges are quite wide. Even within a given company, the range would be pretty broad for each pay grade, e.g., a research associate’s I salary could range from $45k to $60k. That is quite a gap. Long-term employees who started when companies were small also experience the so-called salary compression - it is a term of the art.
http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/compensation/articles/pages/salary-compression-lid.aspx
This is my fear in the year coming up - salary and negotiations. It’s hard getting numbers from those entering in the industry that I’m looking into because the job titles are varying so much. I’d hate to know that I cheated myself out of a higher salary. I would appreciate a little transparency.
Please give a citation to such a law (as opposed to social conventions and company policies).
Indeed, as noted previously, there are many government workplaces where pay levels are a matter of public record, and there are other workplaces where pay levels are standardized enough that it is not difficult to figure out many employees’ pay levels (or ranges).
It is true that not telling others how much one is paid does create an information asymmetry that favors the employer in terms of pay offers. It is likely that this remains the typical social convention because many people prefer not to reveal their pay levels (and thus implied SES) too publicly for reasons unrelated to pay level negotiation with employers.
I don’t have an informed opinion on this except to note that I wish I kept my mouth shut when one of my former colleagues asked me how much I earned. It was quite a bit more than his pay who was senior to me. It didn’t end well. Had I known, I would have avoided answering. If unequal pay is unavoidable, they shouldn’t make it transparent.