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Levels of pay -- ok. Each individual's exact salary? NO.
Overpaid and underpaying are very relative and subjective. I would not want a slack-jawed fellow employee determining if I am overpaid or not, or even having any say-so whatsoever in the matter.
Why would they have a say in the matter? I think there's more animosity about pay with our secret wages than there would be with open wages. A lot of people take wild guesses at what others are making, and then make judgments based on those likely inaccurate guesses.
Whenever I hear a person talking about 'pay transparency', I see a person who feels they are underpaid and everyone else is overpaid. It’s never really about openness; it’s always about their desire to get more because they feel they are getting less and are not equal to others. I mean what possible benefit to the employees is there for 'pay transparency' except to the person who is paid less. If they felt they were at the top of the pay scale, bet they could care less about 'pay transparency'.
Look at how it could turn real fast if the person spouting all this nonsense about the need for 'pay transparency' discovers they are at the high end of the pay scale. Now, instead of this openness resulting in other's pay being raise, it causes their pay to be reduced to be in-line with all the others. That’s fair, isn’t it? Isn’t that what the person really wanted with ‘pay transparency’ After all the point of transparency is rooted in hard workers being paid less than the lazy workers who got more. But that becomes a killer to the person if their belief of being underpaid isn’t true and their belief of getting more becomes a decrease.
I understand the need for people to want to find a way, an excuse, to ask for more pay, but you may be surprised what Pandora’s Box you open with this cockamamie idea. Remember those who want it want it because they feel they are being shafted, they believe other lazy workers are getting more, they believe that this will somehow increase their pay. And, they will whine like little spoil children complaining about how evil this transparency is should it work the other way.
Why? Are you as qualified or more qualified than another employee with the same job duties and title?
It is none of your business what others salary is and if you cannot "bargain" with your own skills and abilities you have nothing to "bargain" with and will probably not move forward quickly.
I am going to share 3 personal experiences. Early in my career i had an internship. Another guy started about one month after i did. We were equally inexperienced in the industry. Somehow i found out his hourly rate. He made 20% less than i did and we had the same duties.
Later in my career i was referred by a friend of a friend for a job. She had 3 more years of direct experience in the role at the company. I was a year or 2 older, but very little of my experience translated directly in the role. I shadowed her for months. When i left the company, i found out i made 20% more than she did as I was leaving, i never received a raise. She did get some during her time at the company. We were both well liked employees.
Another job had a hiring spree when i joined. I had roughly 2 years in a similar role before joining, and my peers had direct industry experience. I made 25% more and they heard to top range for the position was about 15% less than i was making...... They were able to use my pay range (discreetly) to get market rate wages.
If someone asks me, i share. Knowledge is power. I got better at negotiating, and after a few early career missteps have managed to stay on the high end of the pay scale.
I guess you'll have to connect them for me. Unless you think your "slack-jawed fellow employee" actually has enough power to get your salary changed.
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Originally Posted by Rabrrita
Whenever I hear a person talking about 'pay transparency', I see a person who feels they are underpaid and everyone else is overpaid. It’s never really about openness; it’s always about their desire to get more because they feel they are getting less and are not equal to others.
I agree with this at the top levels, but I'm not sure it would be constructive on the bottom levels. Everyone at my workplace is always trying to figure out how much makes anyway, and letting that out would cause moral effects, jealousy, and anger.
I agree with this at the top levels, but I'm not sure it would be constructive on the bottom levels. Everyone at my workplace is always trying to figure out how much makes anyway, and letting that out would cause moral effects, jealousy, and anger.
Part of the thing is people try to do that to figure out if they got low-balled or someone got high-balled and if they actually deserve the low or high ball. I think if pay was transparent even on the lower level, it would be easier to negotiate and say that you deserve the higher end of the market value spectrum and the company may have to suck it up to keep you instead of take "well you balled at our offer and it is was the only offer we will willing to give you so we decide to move forward with another candidate who will take the pay."
You are talking about from the outside looking in. What about once you get into the company and you know that Joe makes 10k more than you, yet you think you are more qualified than him. Unless you know everything about every employee's working situation you are making assumptions about them.
It would take an entire book for a company to explain why each person makes what they make. There are an astronomical # of factors that come into it. I can see it now.
Jim Smith
-We had been looking for a person for 6 months and none were qualified.
-Jim was at a rival company
-Jim was able to negotiate a large salary because we needed someone badly and he was already in a job he liked
-See Jim's attached resume for his requisite skill set at the time of hire
I'm not completely against companies posting ranges for positions, but most of the time GlassDoor does a good job of this unless it is a smaller company. Another thing is most professional organizations provide good insight into what you can expect in your profession given the area of the US you are in.
No this is dishonest. A few companies already do pay transparency.
Your point is not even an argument against pay transparency.
Again if the pay discrepancies within a company can be explained and truly aren't based on racial or gender discrimination then pay transparency changes nothing in a company at all, but merely provides everyone with more information.
People who are against pay transparency merely see the current situation to favor the right kinds of workers, and in favor of the status quo. Merely providing this information to all employees changes nothing for companies that can explain pay discrepancies.
When I worked retail the pay scales leaked out. Now they didn't say specifically what some would make but it did give a range and when coupled with locations you could tell with time who was making what range. It angered some as it became apparent that competition drove wages, not cost of living.
Today there's some that say they were hired at a high end prior to the '08 fallout and are trapped at their current wage (i.e. maxxed out)
It has actually been argued that transparency causes wages to go further up...not down. As executives in the 70's were asked about pay it was released and thus it served as a template to other ceo's that did not know otherwise. So it went up and up as they pressured for more wages based on competition.
Ben and Jerry's when they hired a CEO quickly found out that their expectations required them to raise salaries to get what they want.
Once that happened we determined the payscale for the position and it was based off of a payscale chart that we kept.
My job was to get you on board at as competitive a rate as I could within reason. Your part to this is to know the payscale in the area and negotiate your rate. The company was not responsible for providing that to you.
Perhaps the company should be. A company personnel department, having hired many people over the years, has a very good handle on how much they're going to have to pay to fill various positions. The personnel department knows how strenuous and stressful the job is likely to be, knows what salaries have led to employees quitting and which have resulted in long-term veterans sticking around.
The potential employee, on the other hand, knows none of this; he doesn't have anywhere near your info on market rates and certainly knows little to nothing about life inside your company.
I think people on the hiring side forget just how difficult it is for a job-changer to estimate his or her value. The culture of salary secrecy prevents the average person from having very many data points. If you haven't negotiated a salary in many years (or in your entire life), you might have no idea at all on where to start from... but it's "your part" to know this? I myself have worked abroad for many years (where seniority matters a lot, and where "job titles" don't exist in the American sense), so I would prefer that the interviewer just say how much they're offering, or that the previous person doing the job was an X-year veteran, had skills A, B, C, and D, and was paid $xx,000. Then I could try to negotiate upward by pointing out what additional skills I bring to the table.
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Companies are not out to try and get you for nothing. Most that I've dealt with have a payscale and HR requires that payscale to be approved by management and any new hires for specific positions must fall somewhere within that scale.
If you have an established pay scale, why not tell the potential employee what it is up front? You say that you start negotiations at the low end, but how is an employee to know that? He might be thinking that your low end is in fact a competitive offer, and think that that's all he's worth. Then if he doesn't get the job and has to negotiate somewhere else, he's underselling himself.
Just tell people what the scale is and make them justify themselves if they want to be in the upper part. By keeping your scale secret, you hold all the cards.
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