Re:The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess
by pikzen on Thursday March 23, 2017 @05:36AM
(#13938387)
Discussing salary is only taboo because your employers make it taboo. By keeping your salaries a secret, they get more leverage in negotiations, can afford to give you much smaller raises, and have a general upper hand. Keeping salaries secret is nothing more than ensuring you stay on the bottom of the society.*
Your employer, however, is happy to keep all that money.
This is why we need unions. Because as a single person, you have absolutely zero leverage over your employer. Sadly, fear on each side is what makes the agreement work, properly.
* Applies more as you go down the chain of responsibility, or salary. Needless to say, software developers are not doing that badly in the grand scheme of things.
Re:The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess
by haikuginger on Thursday March 23, 2017 @05:51AM
(#13938443)
> if money was truly worshiped, why would discussing salary be taboo?
Perhaps worship isn't the right word- it's more akin to fetishization. The religious right does a similar thing with sex, with similar results.
I disagree -- if money was truly worshiped, why would discussing salary be taboo? I think it has more to do with things like a just-world hypothesis [0] run amok, a long-term political trend in decreasing union power, and a lack of awareness about exactly how much surplus value is being siphoned away before the average person sees any of it.
I mean, "stop worshiping money" almost feels like victim-shaming. To the extent that the average person worships it, it's because they didn't have it in the first place.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis