It is illegal to prevent people from discussing their salaries in the United States. National Labor Relations Act, 1935, plain as day, and reaffirmed several times in court.
I'm also proud to work in Massachusetts, where it's illegal for prospective employers to ask about your prior job's salary. This harms workers by pegging future comp to past comp. It's particularly destructive to women and people of color. There are sneaky ways for employers to circumvent this law - I've written a blog post before about how this happens: http://cushychicken.github.io/what-to-say-when-asked-salary-...
Discussing salary is, in my view, one of the last major bits of power retained to workers in the US. It is also one of the only labor rights that the government has meaningfully protected.
Talk about your salary with others. It's an important behavior to normalize, and a powerful way to help spur pay equity in this country. It's one of the easiest ways to push back against the information asymmetry that most corporations naturally exploit. (Though I suspect this is almost purely out of self interest, and not any real malice.)
As someone who doesn’t live in a western democracy, help me understand why “people of colour”, “wage gap”, “minorities” and all these other keywords need to be shoehorned into so many articles and discussions? It is so tiring to find any kind of articles that report things without getting the author/organisation’s political agenda in the way.
it’s particularly destructive to anyone who starts out low wage. In other words, anyone who starts as the working poor.
I'm firmly of the belief that poverty is intersectional to the discrimination of women and non-white people in the USA.
The data bears this out. Salary data about these demographics suggest that women make about 60-80% of what a man is paid for similar work. People of color - particularly Black men - are in a similar position.
This is certainly not an issue solely confined to the working poor, either. It transcends class boundaries. It just happens to impact low income women and POCs more severely because it means they're batting from behind on two fronts instead of just one.
> Disclosing your salary can turn a potential double digit raise when changing jobs to a few percent raise. You could leave thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars on the table.
But isn't it possible for this to happen in the opposite direction? I.e., turning a pay cut into a small raise.
Here's my unvarnished opinion as a former recruiter turned developer...
You would have to be a complete and utter moron to truthfully relate your current or former pay history to a potential employer.
There are two primary things that they are doing when they ask for your salary history:
1. They want to know whether they can get you for cheap
2. They want to know the rates that the market is setting for a person of your talent level
You never have to be truthful about what you were paid and why you left unless you are in a profession that requires such information to be disclosed.
Add 20% and let them negotiate you down to what you are willing to move for. Any employer that isn't competent enough to price your talent versus the market is an employer who will screw you over in the future.
What I do is combine all of my current salary & benefits (including counting my PTO as additional "base" salary) and then round that up to the nearest $2.5k.
I have that number ready so that if I mention my previous salary I have a number that amounts to the value of my current or previous job to me to set the base for the upcoming one.
Example: If your salary is $25/hr with 2 weeks PTO and other Perks valued at 5% annual salary (401k matching, health insurance, work perks like food or discounts, etc.) That is $52k + $2k + ~$3k = ~$57k rounded up to $57.5k is the "Previous" annual salary I would represent.
That poses you as someone who would "jump ship" for $60k + similar benefits when in reality it would be a 15% pay raise to have the same benefits + an additional $8k a year.
It's a win all around. The recruiter thinks they're getting a deal, you know you're getting a deal, and everyone is happy and no one is the wiser.
isn't it possible for this to happen in the opposite direction? I.e., turning a pay cut into a small raise.
It is, but that's only something that can happen when you allow the company to make the first offer.
If they do, and they undershoot your current comp, it likely means that:
* they have no idea how to price your skills against the market rate,
* they are strapped for cash, and trying to get you at a bargain price, or
* they are simply trying to lowball you and see what you do.
You can counter by saying something to the effect of "Thanks, but that represents a pay cut for me, and that doesn't make financial sense for me right now." An honest mistake will result in them hustling to redo the offer to your liking. I don't know thst I've ever seen an honest mistake of this kind from a recruiter. They simply have too much data for me to believe that.
None of these scenarios are a great look for a company that wants to recruit you. Seeing these from a company offering me a job leaves me pretty hesitant to work for them. To me, it telegraphs either amateurism, or bad faith negotiations.
The one exception to this - and, I gotta say, this tradeoff has never made financial sense to me, personally - is to take a pay cut to work at a startup. At that point, you're swapping pay for the opportunity to learn or advance your career in some other way.
These articles never seem to touch on the point which matters to me: I don't want the workplace social peer pressure of who makes more, or less, etc. and the drama which comes with it. The belief that every employee wants there to be open sharing of salary data is not universal.
I don’t want to know what bob or jill make but i do want to know the company pay bands. It’s really silly when im looking for other jobs that i pass everything then get to the offer to counter it and ooops looks like your 5k over the band for what we wanted to hire you for. Great would have been nice to know up front that unless I interview at whatever your requirement is for staff level on the day of the interview this wasn’t going to work. Its draining and a waste of everyones time.
Why don't you want to know what Bob or Jill makes? If they make more than you and are better than you, you can see where you will be after you improve. If they get paid more than you and are worse than you, then you can use that knowledge to get a raise. If they make less than you and are better than you, you know they're going to start getting paid more which will make everyone better off. And if they get paid less than you and are worse than you, they'll be more receptive to mentoring.
And the someone who made that decision can explain why one of you is paid more. And instead of one of you spending your career thinking you're so great, you find out that X skills are lacking or Y skills are not valued where you are. So you improve your skills or find a job with a better fit. That sounds great.
The employees at tech firms I’ve worked at solved this by “anonymizing”. Basically a few folks maintained a big publicly readable spreadsheet with columns like Title, Level, YOE, YOE at Company, Office Location, Gender, Base Comp, Total Comp. Technically the fields were sufficiently granular that some rows could in principle be de-anonymized, but that wasn’t really the point.
N.b. This was just random employees collecting volunteered information, nothing HR-sanctioned.
The fact remains that this seems likely to increase the perception of unfairness, lower the level of individual happiness, and increase the time spent complaining and analyzing salary discrepancies.
Things will never be exactly equal. Why focus time emphasizing the differences?
If you accept a job, wait a year, then start interviewing at least one interview every 6 months. You'll improve your interviewing skills and learn your market value.
What your coworkers make at your current job is not a strong indicator of your market value. What actual employers are willing to pay you is much better data.
Don't forget, a huge component in salaries is social skills.
If you want to optimize for everybody getting paid perfectly fairly, sure. If you believe there are diminishing returns to that and our time as people is better spent growing the pie, then that isn't information, it's noise.
As an individual, why would I care about growing the pie and not my own salary? It's not about optimizing everyone getting paid fairly. It's about optimizing your own pay.
"Growing the pie" means making the company more successful, and if you have any equity in it, then it's likely to make you more money long term than arguing for more cash. Also, if you happen to be at a good company with honest and responsible management, then your compensation will be accurately adjusted based on your business value. So, doing good useful work will optimize your own pay as well as benefit everyone else.
If you're at a crappy company with crappy managers, then yeah maybe you just need to play politics until you're paid enough to justify not quitting. If you have the means to move on from a job you don't like, though, you should probably work toward fixing that regardless of the compensation.
> if you have any equity in it, then it's likely to make you more money long term than arguing for more cash.
It depends on how much equity. If you have a greater percentage of ownership than you do of total salary, that makes sense. (Unless it's publicly traded, because then you can buy more stock with the more money.) But that seems unlikely most of the time. So, yes, it's better for founders or major shareholders.
I don't follow that asking for more money is "playing politics"
Equity is a long term investment which ideally compounds exponentially over time (even if it only matches inflation) in a way that you, as an active participant, can positively or negatively influence. Salary is steady income that linearly accumulates (and loses value over time unless invested), so it's kind of apples to oranges. Undervaluing a modest amount of equity when you're young can lead to a large missed opportunity cost decades later. It's certainly hard work with an element of luck to get equity in a company that takes off like a rocket, but that's why high-risk high-reward is a saying.
If your compensation doesn't accurately reflect your merit to the company, then it instead reflects arbitrary social power dynamics. If you stick around somewhere that you believe is taking advantage of you, and try to up your pay through leverage or non-merit based arguments, then that definitely seems like politics to me.
Just asking for money if you think you deserve it isn't inherently politics, though. If you're genuinely being underpaid and think the company is dropping the ball but acting in good faith, then having an honest conversation with your manager is healthy, and should result in the situation being resolved favorably.
sgtnoodle said it well. I'll only add that if everybody thinks only of their own salary and not the company, you enter into a tragedy of the commons that kills the company (taken to the extreme).
Yes, they are, and they always will be. I don't disagree that we shouldn't make things fairer, but i believe there's a limit at which of becomes a meaningless exercise.
Yes, I agree. I'm providing another perspective that I think is missing, not arguing that we should always think this way. It's healthiest to consider multiple viewpoints.
I think it has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with negotiating your salary. The more you know about the market, the bigger your leverage is.
And if it so happens that you earn less as a result of gaps in your skills, you should own it and work on yourself.
Maybe the reason for the lower level of happiness, more time spent complaining... is different (unfair) pay for essentially the same job. How about treating the cause instead of blaming the messenger.
Finding out that your loving wife cheated on you early in your relationship after 40 years of marriage. Learning that people don't care about you as much you think they do. Knowing exactly how you will die.
These are things you may personally emotionally prefer to be ignorant of, but in all cases you are more capable and armed with the knowledge than without.
> Recent years have also brought more clarity around best practice on transparency: many workers favour a non-specific kind of salary disclosure where firms reveal ranges, averages and information about wage gaps rather than individual data.
nod I think these are two branches of the tree and this problem is more in line with role disclosure (I'm not saying this well - for example, the need on job postings to list the actual salary range up front, like I know some non-US countries and I think recently Colorado? implemented into law).
The branch of this problem tree I speak of intersects more like "OK the band for level 3 is 50k-60k USD. Mark makes 60k and I make 50k but I feel my work is better than his and I've been here longer." This article is mostly about individual sharing, I think that quoted part is a nod in context to the other branch of the problem root which is just as important in it's own way. Not the best at making up examples, sorry.
Bands still seem helpful to the discussion. If Mark is making 60k then its clear the company is valuing him more and that might open the door to a beneficial discussion.
Seems like it at least gives you some metrics to compare to rather than just favoritism.
While I loathe the seniority system that Union folks use, at the very least their pay is all out in the open and everyone knows what everyone makes and it still works. The biggest issue is just overcoming the cultural hurdle of acknowledging that your pay is not your identity, it's just a number that you can negotiate and if you're undervalued, instead of pissing and moaning to other employees, you go find a new job that pays what you're worth.
> The belief that every employee wants there to be open sharing of salary data is not universal.
I would have thought that the desire to know if you're being treated fairly is universal. You really wouldn't mind making a fraction of what your coworkers make?
What if you had a pool of anonymous employee-contributed data about title + pay + benefits that showed you where you were on the distribution? Would you contribute to, and view, that.
I once worked for a bodyshop where the director was the only guy hired by the actual company we were working for.
One of the first few things we learned about him was that a clause in his contract forbid him from discussing our salaries and working conditions with us.
Long story short, I switched jobs shortly after because we were doing a lot of unpaid overtime, and tons of things that had nothing to do with a software developer's job.
But the straw that broke the camel's back was that we found out every engineer had a different contract -different salary, bonuses, etc.-, even when we had similar experience. The director's boss thought we wouldn't find out just because of that silly clause.
If you are being asked not to discuss your salary, apply Occam's razor, and either deal with it or run away.
That seems so much more complicated and expensive than just offering compensation and bonus based on a standard scale. Obviously there's some wiggle room within the pay scales to reward higher performing employees but to have totally different compensation schemes for each employee sounds extremely complicated and unnecessary.
I never understood the need to make things so complicated. The additional gains per year with that scheme vs giving everyone the same contract were just a few thousand €.
I should point out that US law protects employees rights to openly discuss their salaries. It is entirely reasonable and legal to forbid a supervisor from discussing/publicizing the salary of all their subordinates. Whether that is a good business decision is a very different question.
I'm sorry, I'm not 100% sure what you are saking. You haven't seen anything similar to bosses not publishing their employees salary? Or US law protecting the rights of employees in something?
Sorry, I meant explicitly forbidding a supervisor from discussing working conditions or salary with their subordinates is pretty rare in Europe, and in fact that's the only time I've been told of such thing.
I was wondering if that kind of clause is a common thing in the US - for instance limiting job mobility by not allowing you to work for X client for N years is common in Europe, while I get it's rare in the US from what I read on social media / HN.
In the US its rare for a supervisor to divulge what your coworkers are making. It's normally not "forbidden" just not done. Heck, look how antsy some people are at telling other people their salary in this thread. Does your boss tell you what your peers make?
As someone who has worked in a French SSII, and talked with other consultants: it's common here too. The intermediaries want to maintain information asymmetry.
I met IT worker with security clearance that worked someplace that you needed security clearance.
They were unable to discuss salary (or any personal financial matter) because of that security. The reasoning being it potentially opened them up to being "turned" by foreign state actors either via financial bribes or financial blackmail.
I don't buy it -- I've held clearances from that required a NAC to ones that required an SSBI, and got my first US National Security clearance when I was 16 and continuously held a clearance for about 20 years, as both a federal civil servant and a contractor, and never once was asked not to discuss my pay.
I buy it. It is fairly well known that too much or the wrong kind of debt can cost you even secret clearance. So for other compartments to require pay secrecy is well in line with that concern.
You can have high salary and still be indebted. Also you don't have to discuss salary to negotiate how much they would like to earn as an extra (and that may not even be money). I don't buy it, that doesn't make sense.
As someone who works in IT, with a security clearance, I am pretty sure this is a lie. We talk about salary all the time. Some people are weird about it, but that has been true every place I have worked at.
I think there's a very narrow window where the value of information or control you have access to is worth less than the value a bad actor can extract from it.
I think the background check for these jobs _does_ check if you have debts etc. and I think probes into your financial history to see behaviour - they won't take you on if you're a risk.
The salary thing is nonsense though, a motivated foreign state actor will find ways of bribing if they detect you can be corrupted.
I have held a clearance while a private contractor and worked with many who held clearances, both as contractors and government civilians. There were many restrictions on what we could talk about because of security. Salary was not one of them. Some of us were under direction from our private contractor companies to not discuss salary. That had nothing to do with security. It was about maximizing profit and leverage for the company.
Contractors don't follow the government scale, the can make different amounts. Government people typically have better benefits and job security, so contractor's salary can be a fair bit higher.
It is a point of reference though, you can know how much many of the people that work with you make.
Consider only the GS scale. There are many with security clearances. We know what they make. I was replying to the person who said that security clearances required that compensation be secret. That is obviously not true.
That's unlikely but he was probably told that. I contracted in IT for a Federal agency with a Secret clearance and encouraging us not to talk numbers was a key part of the company's negotiating tactics.
I suspect it’s much more mundane: If you want to know how much money your adversary is spending on $PROGRAM, you can get part of this with some salary info and head count.
Agree: This program isn't paying enough per head to be employing security architects, this project is employing lots of juniors, ... sounds useful if you're targeting projects to exploit?
Can pay transparency potentially limit/discourage horizontal mobility for workers as a second order effect?
As in "there is no point to explore other domains/companies in my industry since my compensation will not change for my seniority level even though I understand that the value I deliver for society might increase exponentially"
Can pay transparency level up the field by removing the incentive for hyper-productive outliers, pulling wages down, as a second order effect?
As in "I'm sorry Jane, we appreciate that you've been working 80 hour weeks and is solely responsible for the success of this project but 20 other engineers in our team who have the same seniority level as you are making $N and we can not pay you a dollar more (otherwise they would have to give the same raise to other 20 engineers to make it look fair). Promotion is another option, you are on track but it will take a year or two"
Is it possible that push for pay transparency is just pandering to the lowest common denominator where best and brightest are left behind?
Does pay transparency necessarily mean that someone can't get a raise? In this theoretical scenario, Jane would know exactly how much she's being paid in comparison to the other engineers. If she's performing better than them while getting paid the same, she would know that she's worth more.
The scenario you've described seems to imply that the company doesn't already know everyone's salaries. Pay transparency isn't what kept the company from giving her a raise; in fact, without pay transparency they could have told her that she was making more than her coworkers.
Point being that companies can already refuse to give a raise by saying some boilerplate like "you're being competitively compensated for an employee of your seniority, and unfortunately we can't give you a raise."
> If she's performing better than them while getting paid the same, she would know that she's worth more
This is another area where pay transparency can complicate things. Jane may have the same experience and education as other employees, but much higher performance and work ethic. Unfortunately, this isn’t easily quantified, whereas the other characteristics are, which can create resentment among her peers who don’t see the other value that she’s providing.
I think everyone agrees that salary secrecy benefits primarily the company over the employees as a group. But the subtlety is that it also benefits the good negotiators or others who are seen to provide unique value by management as they can be paid more without inflating salaries across the board. As an individual, there's a game theory aspect where if you believe you are paid more, it is not in your best interest to share that information. Now of course you might choose to ignore this and disclose anyway in solidarity with your colleagues and a belief in the greater value of transparency, but it may come at some personal cost.
> As an individual, there's a game theory aspect where if you believe you are paid more, it is not in your best interest to share that information.
If you're really able to provide your employer with more value than other employees, it's in your best interests that other employees' base pay rates rise, because you can raise your rates in relation to them and the additional value you can offer.
I'm all for pay transparency. Information symmetry is good and I admire the Swedish system in regards to taxes which is very open.
As the article points out it'd probably be a boon for minorities who traditionally do less well in secret negotiations for different reasons despite being equally competent, and paying equally competent people the same is good both for the firm and for the individuals in the long run.
Personally, I would start to question myself if I felt like I had to hide what I make. Never worked anywhere where hard working people were maligned for their salary if it was justified.
I, a man, "foolishly" told a female coworker with the same position what raise and salary I got. I had negotiated 10% more pay than the base offer, she hadn't. She went to HR and dragged my name and salary through these proceedings, arguing a woman was getting paid less to do the same job as a man. Nevermind I had a masters and was faster and more versatile as a worker...she got a much bigger raise than I did so her pay ended up equal to mine, despite lack of negotiating or higher Ed or better performance.
HR responded by sternly telling me I should not discuss salaries. Why not? So you can underpay people? There's literally zero reason other than that for us to not discuss it. The CEO literally owns a dozen Tesla's, pure unadulterated greed on his part.
I mean, it sounds like she used the information as leverage to negotiate a better salary for herself, which is exactly what you’re complaining she didn’t do.
It sounds like now you’re being relatively underpaid — if they value her lack of skills at the same level of your having skills, something’s gone wrong.
In fact, according to your definition, this is exactly a scenario where a pay disparity “should” exist. Perhaps you should both be getting paid better, but there should be a difference
>> HR responded by sternly telling me I should not discuss salaries. Why not?
Doesn't your own anecdote show exactly why not?
You make the same amount of money that you did before this happened, but now you are obviously angry that someone you consider less qualified now makes the same amount as you, you seem angry that you got dragged into the discussion, and you also seem angry that your CEO has more money than you.
In the US, discussion of pay and working conditions while on the job and off are protected acts under the NLRA. The NLRB is the board that enforces those protections.
Can you waive those protections away by signing a contract that contains a clause that forbids salary discussions, or would that clause of the contract become unenforceable?
It would be unenforceable, with the caveat that the protection only applies to non-supervisory roles and only when discussing salary with other employees internally. Companies can still limit your ability to disclose your salary externally, as a trade secret.
Maybe it's sector dependent I've mostly worked in financial services, would be good to find out what the wider picture is I'm thinking my view is skewed now!
In the interest of pay transparency: I am a white, male Group Manager for Avanade, an Accenture subsidiary, in Houston, Texas. I work as a Data and AI architect. My base salary is $183,000 a year.
The fact that it feels somewhere between dangerous and transgressive to post that speaks volumes to me. What weird evolutionary mechanism brought this on?
I'm also proud to work in Massachusetts, where it's illegal for prospective employers to ask about your prior job's salary. This harms workers by pegging future comp to past comp. It's particularly destructive to women and people of color. There are sneaky ways for employers to circumvent this law - I've written a blog post before about how this happens: http://cushychicken.github.io/what-to-say-when-asked-salary-...
Discussing salary is, in my view, one of the last major bits of power retained to workers in the US. It is also one of the only labor rights that the government has meaningfully protected.
Talk about your salary with others. It's an important behavior to normalize, and a powerful way to help spur pay equity in this country. It's one of the easiest ways to push back against the information asymmetry that most corporations naturally exploit. (Though I suspect this is almost purely out of self interest, and not any real malice.)