I worked for a company that promised salary transparency but never followed through, citing reasons about software delays etc. It was incredibly frustrating because I knew through the grapevine that I was getting paid less than my male counterparts and I was hoping that transparency would lead to more equality.
The one good reason I heard against salary transparency was from a friend at the same company who was managing a global team. Salaries varied greatly across Europe, Asia and the US. In particular, the team based in Barcelona was very upset about the (significant) difference between their salaries and those of their counterparts in San Francisco. It puts the manager in an uncomfortable position of having to explain that it’s two separate labor markets with very different pay scales. Cost of living is a lot lower in Barcelona plus there’s not the expectation that your salary is not just enough to live on but also your emergency savings, healthcare, retirement. There’s also the even more uncomfortable truth that the team in SF worked a lot harder than the team in Barcelona - fewer holidays & vacations but also more hours per day, higher output. It’s a lot to ask a manager to discuss and defend some of those large cultural differences.
Interestingly I’ve also had a few friends recently leave San Francisco tech jobs for positions in London & Stockholm. They go in with open eyes that they are going to be taking a hit to their compensation but are willing to make the tradeoff for greater quality of life - lower cost of living, more vacation, lower intensity, lower stress.
Super interesting. My husband and I live in Spain, and all that you say rings true. Quality of life is taken care of culturally and through social safety nets (healthcare, childcare, etc etc.)
But working in European teams of international companies we understand national differences.
What doesn’t make sense to me is that in the same country salaries wouldn’t be transparent.
There seem to be two different but related issues here: negotiation and disclosure. Ultimately, I don't think you can avoid negotiation; there is no objective way to determine a fair salary or a fair price - it's always going to come down to what somebody is willing to pay and somebody else is willing to accept. But without disclosure, you are negotiating blind. Employers know how much they are paying everyone else, and often what the rates are in the industry - most workers, though, don't, and that puts them at a huge disadvantage.
This sounds right to me. Salaries are indefensible—all of them. Who has greater impact on lives, nursery and primary school teachers or college professors? Whatever your response, does it “defend” the pay disparity? How about the health impact of doctors vs. garbage collectors? If it’s all about years of educational achievement, is that truly a “defense” for the degree of salary disparity? I’d say no. It’s an explanation, not a defense.
Any salary disparity can be “explained.” Years of seniority, competition for labor, future potential, cost of living in different locations, etc. etc. There’s always an “explanation.”
It would be nice if we could all agree on what constitutes “fairness” when it comes to salaries—but we don’t. Most of us (all of us?) don’t even know what WE think constitutes salary fairness.
Given the inherent indefensible-ness of salaries, transparency often just pisses people off. That’s one reason why managers resist transparency. Another reason for resistance is that it gives workers another tool to negotiate for themselves. I think transparency pushes salaries up while sometimes (ironically) increasing worker dissatisfaction.
Even if you take the "greater impact" approach, you can't avoid a basic problem. It is pretty clear that, for example, primary school teachers are more important to society than leading movie actors - and yet the latter earn far more, for a very simple reason: each primary school teacher's work benefits only about 20-30 people, but the movie actor's work reaches literally millions. So if the parent of each student were willing to pay $2000 per year, the teacher would only earn $40,000 to $60,000. On the other hand, if each movie goer paid just half a dollar to the actor, he could easily earn millions of dollars. On the other hand, if you added the salaries of all of the teachers in the world, you'd come up with something probably lots larger than the salaries of all the pro athletes.
In reality, salaries make perfect sense when you understand that they represent the value _perceived by the employer_, combined with the scarcity of people available to do the job. Fairness is just another opinion, and often based on relatively little knowledge of the circumstances.
Leaders love to preach open doors and transparency until someone mentions money. The sad part is we equate some jobs with attracting revenue (sales, business development) and others (you mention editors and writers in magazines) are underpaid because they’re viewed as a replaceable cost of doing business.
I was head of global security for a hotel company and my colleagues and I were always met with the argument that it was imperative to keep costs down (some sales and development people had bigger bonuses than my gross salary). One year, I showed them how companies where we built relationships with our corporate security counterparts grew their business with us 3x faster than the average corporate client, my boss thought I fudged the numbers and the head of Sales and Marketing, whose numbers I used for the calculation, tried to convince us that they had run some sort of extra campaigns for those exact companies. He couldn’t show us one concrete example. At the end of the day my boss told me I should stick to our “core” role and leave business growth to the expert.
He didn’t seem to see the link between what we did and the growth in business from clients. Just like the business side of magazine publishing doesn’t see the link between writing, editing etc. and the sales success. It doesn’t all come from marketing and hype.
In cases of large multinational corporations there is some sense in a lack of total transparency but this doesn’t account for situations in smaller or more “local” industries. For example, a horticulturist with two masters degrees who discovered she is being paid less than her male counter parts with less experience. Transparency across the board at every level may be complicated and unnecessary but if we aren’t careful that will just become an excuse not to be transparent on levels where it would be helpful for the moving toward basic equality.
I worked for a company that promised salary transparency but never followed through, citing reasons about software delays etc. It was incredibly frustrating because I knew through the grapevine that I was getting paid less than my male counterparts and I was hoping that transparency would lead to more equality.
The one good reason I heard against salary transparency was from a friend at the same company who was managing a global team. Salaries varied greatly across Europe, Asia and the US. In particular, the team based in Barcelona was very upset about the (significant) difference between their salaries and those of their counterparts in San Francisco. It puts the manager in an uncomfortable position of having to explain that it’s two separate labor markets with very different pay scales. Cost of living is a lot lower in Barcelona plus there’s not the expectation that your salary is not just enough to live on but also your emergency savings, healthcare, retirement. There’s also the even more uncomfortable truth that the team in SF worked a lot harder than the team in Barcelona - fewer holidays & vacations but also more hours per day, higher output. It’s a lot to ask a manager to discuss and defend some of those large cultural differences.
Interestingly I’ve also had a few friends recently leave San Francisco tech jobs for positions in London & Stockholm. They go in with open eyes that they are going to be taking a hit to their compensation but are willing to make the tradeoff for greater quality of life - lower cost of living, more vacation, lower intensity, lower stress.
Super interesting. My husband and I live in Spain, and all that you say rings true. Quality of life is taken care of culturally and through social safety nets (healthcare, childcare, etc etc.)
But working in European teams of international companies we understand national differences.
What doesn’t make sense to me is that in the same country salaries wouldn’t be transparent.
There seem to be two different but related issues here: negotiation and disclosure. Ultimately, I don't think you can avoid negotiation; there is no objective way to determine a fair salary or a fair price - it's always going to come down to what somebody is willing to pay and somebody else is willing to accept. But without disclosure, you are negotiating blind. Employers know how much they are paying everyone else, and often what the rates are in the industry - most workers, though, don't, and that puts them at a huge disadvantage.
This sounds right to me. Salaries are indefensible—all of them. Who has greater impact on lives, nursery and primary school teachers or college professors? Whatever your response, does it “defend” the pay disparity? How about the health impact of doctors vs. garbage collectors? If it’s all about years of educational achievement, is that truly a “defense” for the degree of salary disparity? I’d say no. It’s an explanation, not a defense.
Any salary disparity can be “explained.” Years of seniority, competition for labor, future potential, cost of living in different locations, etc. etc. There’s always an “explanation.”
It would be nice if we could all agree on what constitutes “fairness” when it comes to salaries—but we don’t. Most of us (all of us?) don’t even know what WE think constitutes salary fairness.
Given the inherent indefensible-ness of salaries, transparency often just pisses people off. That’s one reason why managers resist transparency. Another reason for resistance is that it gives workers another tool to negotiate for themselves. I think transparency pushes salaries up while sometimes (ironically) increasing worker dissatisfaction.
It’s a mess. I wish I had a solution.
Even if you take the "greater impact" approach, you can't avoid a basic problem. It is pretty clear that, for example, primary school teachers are more important to society than leading movie actors - and yet the latter earn far more, for a very simple reason: each primary school teacher's work benefits only about 20-30 people, but the movie actor's work reaches literally millions. So if the parent of each student were willing to pay $2000 per year, the teacher would only earn $40,000 to $60,000. On the other hand, if each movie goer paid just half a dollar to the actor, he could easily earn millions of dollars. On the other hand, if you added the salaries of all of the teachers in the world, you'd come up with something probably lots larger than the salaries of all the pro athletes.
In reality, salaries make perfect sense when you understand that they represent the value _perceived by the employer_, combined with the scarcity of people available to do the job. Fairness is just another opinion, and often based on relatively little knowledge of the circumstances.
Leaders love to preach open doors and transparency until someone mentions money. The sad part is we equate some jobs with attracting revenue (sales, business development) and others (you mention editors and writers in magazines) are underpaid because they’re viewed as a replaceable cost of doing business.
I was head of global security for a hotel company and my colleagues and I were always met with the argument that it was imperative to keep costs down (some sales and development people had bigger bonuses than my gross salary). One year, I showed them how companies where we built relationships with our corporate security counterparts grew their business with us 3x faster than the average corporate client, my boss thought I fudged the numbers and the head of Sales and Marketing, whose numbers I used for the calculation, tried to convince us that they had run some sort of extra campaigns for those exact companies. He couldn’t show us one concrete example. At the end of the day my boss told me I should stick to our “core” role and leave business growth to the expert.
He didn’t seem to see the link between what we did and the growth in business from clients. Just like the business side of magazine publishing doesn’t see the link between writing, editing etc. and the sales success. It doesn’t all come from marketing and hype.
In cases of large multinational corporations there is some sense in a lack of total transparency but this doesn’t account for situations in smaller or more “local” industries. For example, a horticulturist with two masters degrees who discovered she is being paid less than her male counter parts with less experience. Transparency across the board at every level may be complicated and unnecessary but if we aren’t careful that will just become an excuse not to be transparent on levels where it would be helpful for the moving toward basic equality.
Nice work - bit of a hassle having to sign up and sign in to comment - keep up the good work