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CarrKnight
May 24, 2013

quote:

what if a law made it mandatory that every employee's compensation was openly available to all other employees?
It's an interesting idea, but it might backfire.
Make wages transparent for everyone. Every worker can see them and they'll know if they are being discriminated against. Great.
Unfortunately employers can see them too. And this foster collusion. Agreements among competitors to keep wages low are nothing new. Transparent wages make extremely easy to monitor compliance. This makes collusions stronger.
Now, how much that matters is up to debate, but it is a true problem.

I don't know of any case where full transparency was applied to wages. But there are plenty of examples in the good markets. Here's a nice, simple paper that describes a few.

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