My experience too in industry. If you are really that important, you get raises. If you think you are and they don’t, you probably aren’t - at least not important enough to go through all the incredible paperwork to get a raise out of sequence.
How about “I am not getting paid as much as everyone else in my department, and you know good and well that one would expect this NOT to be the case based on my credentials and my job duties. If I don’t get an adjustment, I will be moving over to Department X, which has promised to treat me better. Just FYI.”
First-hand experience showed me this wasn’t “off the table”.
Being a government employee does not mean we can’t negotiate our salaries. It may be trickier than in the private sector (especially in the current budget climate), but it does happen because the government has to keep up with the market just like any other entity. And because salaries are publicly available, it is not hard for employees to see how their departments fare against others. Department heads want to at least create the illusion that they are attractive. If everyone in the program is making shit pay, that means they aren’t being promoted, they aren’t ambitious, and/or their credentials and experience are shit. And none of that looks good.
And if there is a certain snippiness to my post, I apologize, doreen. But I have many coworkers who are under the unfortunate misconception that they can’t do anything about their salaries…that they are “locked in” unless they get promoted or transfer to another position. Just because they work in government. I used to be under the same misconception, and it screwed me over until I got too fed up to stay silent.
I totally wouldn’t go about it by saying “I am more productive than X so I should get more money than she does!” But that’s not the only way of framing the conversation.
Well, I certainly can’t say what happens where you work ( I have worked for very large governments -perhaps yours is smaller and more flexible) but in the governments I’ve worked for, most people can’t negotiate their salaries - " if I don’t get an adjustment I’ll go to Department X" really means " If you don’t get my title changed from Worker 1 to Worker 2 (which will take months if it happens at all) , I’ll go to Dept X which has offered me a Worker 2 position." Of course, in the places where I’ve worked you also couldn’t get paid more or less than someone in the same title with the same experience so you wouldn’t be paid less than your peers to begin with. So you’d really have to frame it as “I’m more productive than X” and unless you’re so much more productive that it justifies the months-long process to reclassify the position, it’s not going to result in a raise. If the pay for the title is so low compared to market rate that the job is difficult be filled, the job may be allocated to a different pay grade but you still won’t earn more than your less- productive co-worker because she will get the same increase.
I work for a large government too. I don’t know if it has much to do with the size of the government as much as the practices specific to those governments. For instance, where I work it is very possible to have two people with the same title and same experience getting paid substantially different amounts, if one did not negotiate their salary upon hiring while the other did. Also, folks who were hired from the private sector will usually have higher salaries than those who were hired from the public sector, because the base salary hinges on what you were making before you started.
I didn’t negotiate for my salary when I was hired because I was dumb and assumed that this doesn’t happen in the government world. WRONG. I felt like such an idiot when I realized how untrue this was. So anyone who is looking for a government position should do their research before concluding what is and isn’t done. (Don’t expect anyone in HR to educate you, either). Just like every business has different policies, so is every government.
I suppose my reluctance to discuss salary comes from my mother. She felt there were some things that you just don’t discuss with others. Money, religion, and politics were personal matters, and not to be discussed in polite company.
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Money is fraught with a lot of groups in the US (and, as I recall, much of the UK).
My family is British-German originally, and we didn’t discuss money. It’s so ingrained in my family to not discuss money that I actually graduated from college with no idea how to make a budget or balance a checkbook, much less how to handle credit. I assume my parental units thought that I would magically absorb this knowledge through osmosis. :smack:
And growing up down south, no one I knew discussed money.
It’s not just money, there are a lot of things my family didn’t talk about (those of us born after 1965 are much more open than the oldsters).
When I moved to an area with a wider range of ethnic backgrounds, I nearly fell over when someone asked me how much I paid for my car. Because “nice people” didn’t ask those questions!
Amen!
HR exists to protect and represent the employer, not the employee.
I didn’t negotiate my first job. Others, I contracted and set a rate that was the norm for my area and expertise (I have friends who are contractors in the same field, so I was able to set a reasonable rate rather than pull a number of thin air)
For my latest job, I was represented by a good recruiter who got me an additional 8K over what the company initially offered, and 24 days of paid leave, a guaranteed bonus after 1 year, and profit-sharing. I’m not great at negotiating so I may consider going through recruiters from now on.
Maybe that is the core of my original question, GrumpyBunny. How are you supposed to get an idea of what to ask for within a company if you can’t get a straight answer as to what they pay for a given position? I suppose you can get a WAG from salary surveys and I did research a few job search sites for info but since no one is supposed to discuss what they get paid, you can only shoot for a general idea. Ask too much during your interview and you won’t get the job. Ask too little and you only find out how much you screwed yourself after the fact. That is my biggest issue.
Monstro, I never meant to suggest walking into a room and starting a conversation with, “So, how much do you make?” but it seems to me that self imposing a caste system based on wealth isn’t the answer here. For example, if we were talking about our homes and I ask how much you paid for your house, I’m not trying to determine whether you’re good enough for me to talk to, I may just be trying to determine if where you live might be somewhere I would want to, or how your realtor got you so much house for so little. Or I could be just trying to move the conversation along toward something you might be interested in.
It is annoying that so much of what I have had to do (NDAs, intellectual property waivers, no salary disclosures, etc) are to protect the company and sweet tweet exists to protect me, or so it feels.
Exactly. Secrecy about salary allows employers to assign pay based on all kinds of criteria that should be irrelevant. It benefits employers, not employees. I am surprised so few people get that.
Well, you’ll never get a specific number because of a lot of variables.
If you know people in the field who don’t work with you, you can ask them what an appropriate range is.
I find it helpful to speak with headhunters – they know what employees are worth.
Also, glassdoor.com often has a lot of salary info for a company.
So many people are struggling right now, it would make me feel guilty to reveal just how well I’m doing. I’m curious about what other people make since I make enough that I don’t care if they’re doing better, but I suspect they usually aren’t.
I work very hard for what I get, but overall I don’t think the world is a very fair place. I don’t want to call too much attention to that fact.
Really? I’d like to cite that law to my employer. But I am sure my employer will ask where the law is. Can you tell me how to find it?
Well, it doesn’t cover all employees, but the National Labor Relations Board and courts have taken the position that the right to “engage in concerted activity” in 29 U.S. Code § 157* includes the right of employees to discuss the terms and conditions of employment with each other, and section 158 makes it an unfair labor practice to interfere with section 157 rights.
*Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all of such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 158 (a)(3) of this title.
Haha. You should check out the norwegian system. Up until fairly recently they published the tax register, so you could just look up anyone you liked and see their net income, net assets, and tax for any tax year in the past, along with the district they lived in and their year of birth.
With the coming of the internet this needless to say generated quite a mini-industry of websites devoted to comparing peoples wealth on every imagineable demographic dimension and lots and lots of marketing segmentation activity, to the point where people started to complain about it.
So now they no longer publish it since 2012, but it is still public information. You have to log into the tax authority system using your own unique taxpayer ID, and then you can look up anyone you want to see their tax details - but they will get a notification that you have checked their details along with your name, year of birth, town of residence etc.
Probably makes for a few interesting conversations…
That particular law does not apply to your employer, since state governments and their subdivisions are not subject to the NRLA You’re still a public defender, right? If you’re in private practice now, it won’t apply to your employer unless it generates $250,000 in gross revenues.
If you want actual case law, Main Street Terrace Care Center is a good place to start:
N.L.R.B. v. Main St. Terrace Care Ctr., 218 F.3d 531, 537-38 (6th Cir. 2000). Or try “QUICK ANSWERS: WAGE AND SALARY DISCUSSIONS AS PROTECTED ACTIVITY” at 2012 WL 5469851.
Apparently this is something well-known to HR professionals but virtually unknown to lawyers, even those of us in the employment law field. My employer has such a policy in place, for example. However, my wife (an HR professional) knew off the top of her head that it was an NRLA violation.
I actually know a government worker in the US who works for an agency where salaries are strictly set by statute according to education and years of experience. This led to their observation that in lean times, the agency leans toward hiring recent grads and people who never finished their master’s or doctorate. In other words, one could literally be “too expensive” to be hired and no amount of negotiating with the agency could convince them that it’s ok that there’s only $60k left in the budget, I’ll work for that. No, the statute says that your background says we would have to pay you at least $75k, we can’t afford that, thank you for interviewing, the door is over there.
In the defense industry, salaries are often tied to a number of factors, which may have no bearing on your value to the company or your productivity, and which might not even apply to your current job, because you might have been hired for a specific job years ago.
If I am hiring for a job that requires expert knowledge of system X or that requires you at the time of hire to work in undesirable location Y, you will be getting paid a premium for that. Meanwhile, five years later you are working the same job as a co-worker in a different location on a different system, but your pay is now substantially higher relative to theirs because you started at a higher point.
And I can prove there is distinct harm in co-workers knowing each other’s salaries. In my department we have (or rather had) two women who work in finance that were doing the same job and have access to all the salary information, including each other’s salaries. Woman A had more experience and actually trained younger woman B in the job. Meanwhile, woman A has two young kids and a husband who travels out of town quite a bit by car on very short notice, but they decided to have only one car to save money. On any given day, Woman A leaves at the drop of a hat to pick up a sick kid, has a school event, or has to work from home because her husband took the car. Woman B has no kids and her and her boyfriend have separate cars. When disaster strikes, Woman B is always there and willing to work late. Woman A is often no where to be found or is distracted with family issues, and can never work late. Not surprisingly, Woman B has gotten bigger raises than Woman A and as of this year, was making more than her. When it came time for a promotion, Woman B got it, which resulted in Woman A quitting, which was the stupidest thing she could have done because she was the one who got low cost insurance for her family and was the only one with a stable income. She’s inquired about coming back, but we are unlikely to hire her again.
Most of my jobs have been unionized, so the “wage grid” is stable, but your movement, placement etc has a small amount of flexibility. For instance, I had several times in my early career when moving jobs meant starting back at square 1, as a first year employee. At one place, I worked casually for almost a year, and had over 1400 hours of seniority, then accepeted a full time position, and I was kept at year one, level one for another 1800n hours. I have since learned to ask where I am being placed before I accept a job offer and sign the written form.
Management in nursing tends to pay less. At various times teaching or management jobs meant a considerable pay cut. Overtime and shift work can still mean a nurse manager makes less than her staff.
I had one co worker who frequently made the “sunshine list” (List of public employess who made more than $100 000 /year) because she had a full time job at one hospital and a part time job at another, plus worked overtime. She was neither well liked, nor well trusted, but her income wasn’t the reason.
It must be UK culture because my Indian parents felt the same. They never discussed their salary, and I still don’t like discussing mine or telling anyone.