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Infinite Karma posted:With the Paycheck Fairness Act being blocked for the umpteenth time last week, I wonder if this niche issue is really hiding a bigger issue. It'd be interesting for sure. Off the top of my head, just throwing that information out there would cause a lot of angst and much of it would be inappropriate bitching about pay differences that are actually justified. It could also be a double-edged sword. If a prospective employer could look at your record and see what you're making / have made it would be more difficult to change jobs and trade up to a higher salary.
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Apr 15, 2014 18:59
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Infinite Karma posted:I'm making the argument that employers do decide how much you get paid, even if they are unfair pricks who can't justify why they are paying people what they pay them. But employees should know if their employers are unfair pricks, and be able to find employment that is under terms that both parties agree is fair. That's a weird framing. Employees already find employment under terms they agree are fair, and employers can justify why they are paying people what they pay them. Making all salary information public would make available the differences without making available the justifications. It seems like mostly what that will lead to is a bunch of bitching that JENNY HAS BEEN HERE 2 MONTHS LESS THAN ME BUT SHE MAKES 2K MORE when it's possible Jenny has more important projects, or came from another job making more, is better at her job and more useful, or maybe she negotiated better, etc. No matter what, those justifications will be seen as bullshit by the slighted party and the *rabble rabble* will continue. From an employer's POV that is not in any way worth dealing with and so they keep the info private and try to cut those discussions off when they happen.
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Apr 15, 2014 20:42
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Infinite Karma posted:If Jenny is more senior, or has a more demanding set of projects, then it's a good justification for paying her more. A 2K difference between employees makes sense when subjective measures are taken into account. But if Jenny was making twice as much as you, you'd be right to get pissed off when you found out, no? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the situation and almost no one on the complaining end is going to agree with their boss' decision because that's how people seem work. I think you're right that it's not clear what all the ramifications would be. I tend to think it would not lead to many people making more money, but it might compress pay bands and push compensation into whatever vehicles aren't covered under the disclosure law.
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Apr 15, 2014 21:06
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cafel posted:Well even if I were to agree that things would play out your way, I fail to see how uniform gains in employee salary offset by decreased profits is a bad thing. Employees forcing employers to pay them as much as they possibly can instead of employers separating employees in order to get away with paying them as little as they possibly can is like music to my ears. Why do you think it would happen this way, rather than compressing the top of the pay band because employers "want to preserve an appearance of fairness" or whatever?
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Apr 16, 2014 01:17
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cafel posted:Because they need to retain their best talent. If they're not paying their most effective employees what they're worth than those employees can always find a company with more effective management that will pay them that much. That's assuming things work the way they work now, which they won't necessarily. If a supposedly stellar employee wants to jump ship to another company for a raise, that company can point to the pay database and say "sorry, this information is public and hiring you at X wage would be problematic." where before they might have met her requirement and stayed quiet about it. icantfindaname posted:I don't think it's likely that total compensation or total labor costs would go down in that case, I'd be interested to hear why you think they would. It would probably lead to flattening of wage disparities within companies but that would involve salaries below the mean being raised. Labor as a whole would have more bargaining power than before. I think as a whole you'd see more squashing the top down toward the bottom than the bottom toward the top. Labor as a whole would be more constrained than it is now, because employers would be more reluctant to negotiate and employee expectations would be anchored by the public data. You'd get more pay equality but mostly because a lot of people would be making less.
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Apr 16, 2014 13:54
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Kilty Monroe posted:If this were true, open salary data would already be a widespread thing. Probably not. The resentment (some justified, mostly not) and angst that employers would have to deal with would not in any way be worth it. Not to mention employees do not all have the same incentives on this issue and many would probably prefer their pay not be made public. But if it happened, I think the response would be that thing I described.
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Apr 17, 2014 13:20
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drilldo squirt posted:The reason you change jobs in the first place is more money, why would knowing how much you get paid change that? I'm not sure what you mean.
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Apr 17, 2014 14:24
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drilldo squirt posted:The reason people change jobs is that a company is willing to pay them more than their previous job. The worker wouldn't leave if the price the company was willing to pay for their labor wasn't more than what the worker is already getting. Ah, got it. In that sense workers get boned from two directions. First, prospective employers will know exactly what they're making and that anchors what they'll be willing to offer. Second, employers will be able to point to their public pay scale and say "sorry, we can't bring you in above X because we have to maintain an appearance of fairness, etc, etc". So where before you could have bargained your way into a sweet deal, after that becomes impossible and all improvements become marginal. Main Paineframe posted:There's a major difference - protecting workers' rights to discuss wages means only the workers themselves will know the wages in their specific company, while publicly posted wages exposes the data to the public, which allows scientists and activists to pull and compare that salary data to get more accurate looks at the wage gap. Still, that's just data; it just reveals the problem, it doesn't fix it. The problem is it doesn't give any more of an accurate picture. There are a ton of legitimate reasons one person might make more than another person and not only is most of that data about why salaries are what they are not going to be published (because it can't be collected, because there are privacy concerns, etc) but the loudest voices are going to be the ones who don't give a gently caress about what the reasons are and if they're legitimate or not.
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Apr 17, 2014 18:59
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Stanos posted:Why would they know what you were making before unless you willingly divulge that information? I mean some industries it's harder to do but willingly giving a potential employer your salary info is dumb as poo poo. I know some jobs won't let you apply without divulging that information but those kind of companies always gave me bad vibes. The proposal is that everyone's salary data be made public, I think?
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Apr 17, 2014 19:06
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Mornacale posted:This seems like a weird focus on individual "superstar" workers that isn't really material to the point. Sure, if some individual is ostensibly so great that they want to get paid much more than their peers, then I guess that might be difficult for them. But in general, if two companies have their wage scales totally open to prospective new employees, then how is that not going to push the scales upward? If the claim here is that every actor having perfect information with which to make a reasoned decision does not lead to workers receiving the most fair price for their labor, then are you just repudiating capitalism entirely? Because it certainly sounds like your argument is "well, owners are going to screw over the worker no matter what." I just explained two mechanisms that would tend to work against employees getting paid more. Can you tell me why you think having salary information public would result in people getting more money?
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Apr 18, 2014 02:50
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Peven Stan posted:what happens when your network is blindingly racist and won't hire blacks? You should make better friends? Go meet different people?
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Apr 19, 2014 17:55
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Goons. Man. Show me an objective method that I can implement that will reliably sort the most productive people from a pool of candidates based only on what I can observe before employment and I will never again hire on the basis of a recommendation. I am 100% on board with getting the best possible people to work for me. Resumes and interviews are of limited use because while people who say the right things may be honestly awesome, they may also just be honestly awesome at saying the right things. So what am I to do as an employer? In the absence of a method I'm ok with giving a person I know something about through a trusted third party more consideration than someone I know nothing about. Maybe that's unfair. I'm open to a better way but I don't know what that way would be.
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Apr 19, 2014 22:15
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Paul MaudDib posted:They can be created if there is a desire for them to exist. There isn't. Dude, there is a lot of desire. I'm being honest with you. A lot of employers are in the same boat. I have to imagine (though I couldn't say) that there is work being done because occupational psyche and such are things, but I also imagine it's a lot harder than it sounds. Paul MaudDib posted:A practical example of the way you can select people based on task aptitude is the Hi-level Language Aptitude Battery. The way you design a test is you narrow in on the specific aptitudes required to perform a job well and you come up with some tasks that also require those aptitudes which can be done in a preliminary test. That's pretty cool. I don't have resources to fund a group of scientists to research and devise testing for my small business, so maybe someone has implemented this in a modular form that employers can use to test for relatively similar categories of jobs? Paul MaudDib posted:The thing is there aren't many aptitudes required to flip a burger (or any low-skilled job, which now dominate our economy). The thing employers base their decisions on is therefore things like "how much of a team player you are" (i.e. how much they can dick you over with low pay and still have you show up when they schedule you with 30 minutes notice). So you can construct all the tests you want, but a lot of jobs aren't selected on aptitude anyway. How can you base hiring decisions on something like "how much of a team player" someone is? You can't observe that until after you hire them.
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Apr 19, 2014 22:55
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mugrim posted:This is a serious question and be honest. Do you ask specifically why the person is being recommended? Like beyond the exact same bullshit you'd hear in an interview of "working hard" or "team player" or whatever? Have you ever had specifics from a recommendation? Yes to the first and it depends on the second. When I hire from clients (happens sometimes) I get as much information as I can about what the person did and how they performed if I have that kind of relationship with the person I'm talking to. There's a degree of sorting through bullshit there too, of course. Sometimes it's just "I know so and so, he's ok, hard worker, always on time, etc" and that's about as much as I'm going to get either because the person I'm talking to knows the candidate but not professionally, or I'm not in a position where I can ask sensitive questions. But I try to get the low down when I can and everyone goes through the same process of sending a CV / going through an interview regardless of how they came to my attention. The only thing a recommendation guarantees for sure is that even if I have a stack of 100 CVs in front of me I'm going to take a look at the person recommended. Sometimes (depends on the source of the recommendation) it gives a candidate a bump, because the recommender and I have a relationship and I know they're not going to send me someone awful. I hire people through the formal channels, too. It's not a great system and if someone could show me a better way, like I said, I would do it. I just don't know what that way would be.
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Apr 19, 2014 23:09
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Solkanar512 posted:So is it fair to call the firing of Jill Abramson an issue where transparency in pay would have significantly helped things, or is it too soon to tell? Seems sort of unlikely. The whole situation seems like a mess.
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May 16, 2014 19:34
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Solkanar512 posted:Why do you say unlikely? Most of what I've been reading about the topic points to the assertion that over the past decade Abramson was paid less than her male coworkers in similar positions while still performing well, while also pointing out that she had very recently discussed this issue with the board. I'm sure there are details that are wrong or incomplete (since we'll never know for sure), but it seems to me that the NY Times was taking advantage of institutional opaqueness to pay her less money than her male peers, and got kicked out for daring to confront her employer about it. From the Vox stream you linked, she was also disliked by the publishers and they were unhappy with her handling of the paper's digital strategy. [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/15/business/media/jill-abramson-being-replaced-as-top-editor-at-times.html?hp&_r=1]Consider this article talking around the situation.[/u] quote:Ms. Abramson, 60, had been in the job only since September 2011. But people in the company briefed on the situation described serious tension in her relationship with Mr. Sulzberger, who was concerned about complaints from employees that she was polarizing and mercurial. She had also had clashes with Mr. Baquet. Could the pay issue have been a thing? Sure, maybe. Some sources assert her pay wasn't substantially different from that of her predecessors but mostly, you know, they WOULD say that. It sounds like there were several other points of dissatisfaction, though, and that she wasn't effective at leading the news staff. Ultimately we don't know the details and it sounds like everyone who might know is restrained from talking by the terms of the settlement.
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May 16, 2014 20:26
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