Why DO we hide our pay from our co-workers?

[tonyfop]

@Yarster

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.

As a former military member, I am in the same boat as the OP. I always knew everyone else’s pay, and they knew mine. In the civilian job I have now, we share salary info all of the time, because we are all veterans. On August 1, some of us got pay raises and others did not. This was a clerical error, but if we didn’t share, no one would have caught it.

In the example above, why isn’t the pay difference put into the salary as a location differential or job skill differential, and put into the contract so that when those conditions no longer apply, the differentials are no longer paid? What is the point of the company paying someone for working somewhere undesireable when they are no longer working in that location? That is how the military works it. When deployed, I would receive family separation pay, sea pay, imminent danger pay, flight deck pay and possibly a combat zone tax exclusion. This could easily add up to over $1000/month in extra pay and tax savings, which would go away when I got home. If I chose orders overseas there were other benefits I was entitled to until I got back to CONUS.

@Yarster

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.

Again, in the military all pay raises were tied to promotion, which was directly tied to evaluations. If woman B gets a promotion because she is a better worker, it is because she got a better Eval. This can easily be expressed in the annual eval de-brief, where woman A is told that she is rated as promotable because of all of her drama, while woman B is rated as “Early promote” because of her dependability. Not only does an “EP” get to be evaluated for promotion 6 months earlier than usual, it provides more points in the promotion process as well. If woman A wants to get out because she thinks it is unfair, more power to her because there is someone coming up under her who is more deserving of a promotion anyway.

[tonyfop]

Missed the edit window. In the last post I said that all pay raises were based on promotion, and that isn’t true. There are step increases based on your rank and years of service, but they are published and are equal across the board. There are also yearly COLA increases, but they are across the board also. I should have said that all individual merit pay raises are tied to promotion.

[swampspruce]

Well said, tonyfop; you expressed my thoughts exactly.