I used to be military and now work in the civilian world and while it has been good I have a question that only the sharp minds of the Dope can help me with; to wit, what advantage is there for an employee not to discuss what they make with others? I certainly get why management would foster the idea as it makes it easier to pay your employees less overall, and they don’t want to deal with any potential acrimony, but what advantage does not talking confer upon Yours Truly?
I don’t want anyone to know what I make, and I don’t want to know anyone else’s pay either. We get paid within ranges based on our position classification so I could get a rough idea but I don’t even seek out what classifications people are either because it’s none of my business.
The advantage for everyone is it removes one way in which individuals who may already have judgments about each other can compare themselves and each other. It’s just another layer of complication that is not needed.
Harmony within the work place I’d say. Sure if you discuss pays you may all get together and demand a fairer deal, but I think the reality is closer to it fostering envy, jealousy, guilt, and other sinful emotions ;). I’m actually in a situation where all people in the same position get exactly the same pay and the contracts are a matter of public record.
I don’t want my colleagues to know I get paid more than them. It would be awkward to feel like I have to prove to them that I’m more valuable, or to start wondering if I’m resented.
I also don’t want my colleagues to know I get paid less than them. I wouldn’t want them thinking I’m incompetent or unnecessary.
In the free market, everyone in a given company probably gets paid differently for all sorts of reasons - job title, length of time with the company, job performance, accuracy, punctuality, how much the boss likes you, etc.
Keeping your pay rate private avoids all sorts of hurt feelings, jealousy, bickering, whining etc. like “She always comes in late! Why is she getting fifteen cents more an hour when we do the same job?”
I personally don’t want to know how much money other people earn, because most of the time it’s more than I earn, and I’d feel sad and envious.
I sometimes do work putting sheets of paper in order. Sometimes I get a batch of sheets with my coworkers’ names on them, and information on their salaries. I don’t go out of my way to try to remember how much money each person makes, though.
It’s a middle class American thing. Lots of other groups consider money a totally normal thing to talk about, even among casual acquaintances. It’s definitely not as practical as people here make it out to be-- everyone in the federal government has their salary online, and it doesn’t really affect anything.
IMHO, the tight-lippedness is likely a product of middle class insecurity, a vestige of when it was shameful to work for a living, and encouraged (and sometimes even enforced) by employers who get a one sided advantage in salary negotiations.
There are a bunch of project managers who work with me, but not directly for me. They need to know approximately how much I make to account for my time on their projects properly.
Without exception they’ve all at one time or another expressed some weird bitter jealousy or resentment over how much more I make than them. It’s not like my job involves any project management. They seem resentful even though our jobs are entirely different. I can’t imagine how petty they would be if they found out someone with a similar job description was making more than them. I believe this is true of most people in general.
It’s certainly not purely American. Here in the UK, talking about money is often considered gauche, and salaries are especially private.
It might be interesting* to compare how much we know about others’ bedroom and bathroom habits to our knowledge of their salaries. I bet we know a lot less about our friends’ earnings.
I don’t discuss my salary because I don’t want to know my coworkers salary. If they get paid more than me and it’s not evident why, I’m naturally going to feel like I’m being screwed over. And if I get paid more, I don’t want THEM to feel like they’re being screwed over.
I have a good idea what the “old timers” make because the paper did publish our salaries a couple of years ago. At the time, I wasn’t making enough for my salary to get published, but theirs was. There is only one guy that I closely work with whose salary pisses me off. This is a guy who can’t even check his email without having two people walk him through it. Most of us have advanced degrees and he only has a bachelor’s. He spends most of his time working crossword puzzles and smoking, while the rest of us are busting our humps. I will likely never make as much as he does, just because I was hired right before the worse economic recession since the Great Depression. I’m a human being. Of course knowing something like that would make me a bit salty.
I work at a public university and our salaries are public record. I think it would be really weird to work somewhere where I didn’t know everyone’s salaries.
I’ve done payroll for both large and small companies. Employee’s pay rates have nothing to do with productivity, timeliness or general worth. It’s all about how you negotiate and the prevailing rate when you’re hired. I know of several cases where if everyone’s salary had been disclosed it would have caused hard feelings and plummeted morale.
It’s a practice encouraged by the companies doing the employing, so that the staff is less likely to get together and say “hey John makes twice as much as Jill while they do the same work, because John asked for more when he was hired. Maybe Jill should ask for a big raise this year and threaten to take her skills to company z, who she knows pays their employees more than she makes”. Companies can’t actually (legally) prohibit you from talking about salary to other employees of the same company, but they can prohibit you from talking about your salary to employees of other companies.
Many years ago, I took a summer job as a technician at a prestigious art festival. The pay was less than I would normally consider, but I wanted to get away for the summer (oceanfront location and all) and I thought the job would look good on a resume.
At one point during an employee bitchfest, I rolled my eyes and said something to the effect of “I’m only making xxx dollars a week here”.
The reaction was not what I expected. I later found out that of the 150 or so technicians they employed 2 of the techs had a salary 20% more than mine, 4 were making the same salary as me and everyone else was making less, some a LOT less.
It wasn’t a good day for workplace harmony. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.
This. Though less incompetent and more I’m doing something wrong.
Plus, I’ve done salary administration for a large department, even run it, and I know all the factors that make pay positions irrational. And how impossible it is to make it fairer in an environment of piddling raises. There is a pot of money for everyone, and things are usually so out of whack that it is impossible to correct unless you started taking money away from people who were doing a perfectly adequate job.
The only time I felt good about it back during the period of high inflation when the salary pool was big enough to give 10% raises to everyone. Then you could move money around and make things a bit more equitable.
I used to work for a major HR and benefits consulting company and I was in IT with free access to a whole bunch of information to literally millions of people across the U.S. including people within my own company because we also did consulting services for the parent company. I could see how much any of my coworkers made as well as any employee for lots of large companies across the U.S.
I used people that I knew personally from my home town as test cases sometimes. A few of my coworkers could see my personal data as well. It wasn’t very useful information and made me uncomfortable in general. I made a whole lot more money than my boss who was a non-technical manager trying to manage a bunch of IT people and it made me respect him less than if I didn’t know his salary history. I also made a little bit more than his boss, a Director, which made me self-conscious about asking for discretionary pay increases. You couldn’t ever mention it or talk about it freely though because it was still protected information even if you had the need to know it and other people recognized the fact that you did.
In my current position, I am sensitive about it because I work in a blue collar facility and make much more than the vast majority of people there. It wouldn’t be very classy to let them know that directly because they are busting their ass doing physical labor 6 days a week while I can come and go as I please and hardly ever have to leave my office if I don’t want to. My officemate is a junior IT person and makes a fraction of what I make but he is just starting out. Whenever anyone has had a need to know about what I make to plan their own career, I just tell them the name of my consulting company and my title within it. They can look it up on Glassdoor.com and get a broad range of what we make but I never tell the specific amount even to my parents or kids.
Overall salary figures aren’t very useful anyway without a lot more context that include everything from retirement benefits, work related costs, bonuses to vacation policies plus a given individual’s tax situation. Take-home pay can vary widely depending on other details even for people that have the same salary.
Looking at it as a (very) small employer, I try to avoid bringing it up because an employee’s pay says a lot about how I perceive their skills and the unfortunate truth is that most people are terribly deluded about what they know how to do. I want to avoid the argument where I have to bluntly say “Knowing how to add two cells together in Excel does not constitute ‘extensive knowledge’ of MS Office.” (And when I do have that conversation with a person about their skills, I want to discuss it separately from pay.)
Well, I think the UK pretty much invented the particular brand of middle class insecurity where everyone maintains the polite fiction that they are not working for something as crass as wages.
In the US, among the poor discussing wages and prices is common and considered valuable information sharing. In China, “What is your monthly salary” is ordinary smalltalk. This particular taboo is not at all a universal one.
This is completely different from my experience. Almost nobody I know, from any background talks about how much money they have or make - rich, poor, inherited wealth, salary/wage income - neither acquaintances nor closer friends really have any idea what we have and vice versa. The few people I have come across in the past who ask or talk about specific personal finances for no particular reason are almost always the most obtuse and socially inept.