How? As in, what is the actual mechanism by which this issue would go away? These "workers dependent upon Oracle for sponsorship to remain in the United States" are supposed to do what with that new information, exactly? Threaten to leave the country?

I hear this a lot from well-paid tech workers. Just two days ago I responded to a comment here where someone said the solution was for people to "just negotiate better". Right.

That's why I am for unions. Get professionals to negotiate on the workers' behalf, and have everyone agree on precisely the factors (experience, etc) that should be used for determining salaries. Then nobody is dependent on either the goodwill of their employer or their own bargaining skills for a fair salary.

In this specific case the person didn't know she was underpaid. Once she found out she pointed it out and got more money. She wasn't dependent on sponsorship.

In other words, the way to deal with an company which is behaving unfairly towards you is to tell them a piece of information they already know, and then depend on them becoming more fair.

You’ll understand why I’m suspicious. If this worked reliably, why would anyone need to file a lawsuit over $400M in lost wages? Wouldn’t the company have just fixed the problem when they first saw it?

Unions exist in fields and countries where wages are more transparent, too. Transparency is necessary, but not sufficient. That’s why we have a free press, but also elections and courts.

"In other words, the way to deal with an company which is behaving unfairly towards you is to tell them a piece of information they already know, and then depend on them becoming more fair."

You don't depends on them but on an individual basis you can point this out and often you can correct this for yourself. They will still try to screw other employees. And yes,unions are a good way of ensuring this doesn't happen.

No, they shouldn't threaten to leave the company.

Instead they should get a competing offer, that pays way more, and actually leave the company.

Visas are easily transferred between companies.

That sound great, if we assume all these workers knew they could, and has the time and resources to do so, and if Silicon Valley companies weren’t literally conspiring to keep wages down for workers who tried to switch companies.

Corporations have professionals bargaining on behalf of the company. Every solution I hear that doesn’t involve professionals actively bargaining for the workers is putting them right back at the mercy of the company.

You should be careful with that though, because it can cut both ways. I was a part of a company early in my career where certain people were being paid less than others, only the thing was that the big, BIG, bosses didn't know about it. They were told what the average pay was, but they thought that was the pay level that all of the workers were receiving.

Long story short, when the whole thing came out, imagine their surprise, (and delight), to discover a class of workers who would happily work for cheap. The big, BIG bosses proceeded to demand that everyone take a paycut. (Well, everyone who was making more than the average.) So a whole lot of colleagues ended up leaving and looking for other jobs etc.

In the end, it didn't really help the people on the bottom at all. I was just a lowly intern, but that experience definitely taught me a lesson about how the corporate world works.

At one workplace, I and a bunch of others were software leads/managers who rose up through many years hard work, promotions and raises. A new VP of engineering joins and finds out about our salary during the next review. He berates us individually why were are paid so much. What he didn't realize is the team leads did the heavy lifting for development at this company. Many of us said nothing and just looked for new opportunities. From what I heard, projects quickly fell behind schedule, got cancelled. The VP was eventually fired.

And he probably just moved on to a new opportunity.

I've looked him up. He is working on a "startup" idea but I don't think he has gone anywhere with it.

It sounds like the system worked as intended.

Touché.

I guess I never thought about it that way.

"I was a part of a company early in my career where certain people were being paid less than others, only the thing was that the big, BIG, bosses didn't know about it. "

That's pretty weird. Usually the bosses know what everyone is making or can find out. Looking at cost is one of the main duties of a boss.

Not that weird. There are lots of employees and the big bosses tend to only see birds-eye views like project/staffing budgets. They care if a team of 10 costs 2.5m/year. They don't dig into why unless they have a problem with the budget to begin with.

Interesting. In any case, bosses already have salary transparaceny if they care so giving transparency to employees wouldn't change this particular case.

They don't have the need to dig into individual salaries, only once they want to start optimize (read: where to cut down) the salaries. Otherwise, it doesn't help with overall goals.

I worked at place where we did stack ranking, but added a formula that basically divided rank by salary. Anyone making more than about 1.2 times the average of their piers had to constantly justify it.

That should include everyone up through the top. Including their options and bonus etc.

I have read studies that once CEO compensation got public as it is required now it shot through the roof. Makes sense to me. If you hear about someone in similar position making more money you can ask for the same.

not everything is your title+tenure; someone with the same profile might not have the same impact as another. I could see someone getting upset about another person making more and thinking they should be equals when the other person has a greater positive impact on the organization. I'm not as much a fan of open transparency for all positions, including options and bonuses, as I am in favor of published ranges for each position that are reflective of the overwhelming majority of folks in that role at that company.

That doesn't really solve the problem of the opposite situation, nor of the one that was originally under consideration: when a worker with greater impact is paid less, or when workers of similar impact are compensated differently. For that, you do need an accurate understanding of how your peers are compensated. I make less than peers I objectively outperform, and I would not have known unless they had told me personally. If that information had been accessible during my last review, I would have pressed for higher pay, but now that that's passed, both I and my employer have to worry about what my next step is. This could have been avoided if they'd been more transparent up-front.

"I make less than peers I objectively outperform"

From my experience you can go to management and tell them that you think you should be paid X. If that's within the normal range you often get the raise.

At my first company in the US I was told that everybody is making as much as I was offered so I said yes. After half a year I found out that most people made 30% more. I talked to my CTO and told him that I want more and I got more than 30% without much hesitation. I wouldn't worry about asking for more. They won't fire you.

With salary transparency, wouldn’t everyone be paid less? (Not a challenge, just a curiosity.)

Salary transparency already exists, just that it works one way only: the employer knows everyone's salary and they thoroughly research the salaries paid by their competitors.

As a general economic principle, I can't really see any situation where this information asymmetry works to the benefit of the workers. It might benefit some employees in critical positions that can bridge the information gap and gain an advantage over their peers.

But on average, no, transparency reduces the leverage of the employer; else they wouldn't fight to maintain that information differential, they would promote full transparency in order to pay everyone less as you say.

>they thoroughly research the salaries paid by their competitors

How do they go about this? Through means accessible to individuals?

You just go out and buy the information. It's not really available to individuals.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-02/equifax-h...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides a lot of data, not that granular but by region and larger city it is very good: https://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm

Equifax will sell you an individual's data. Like "this guy with this social security number had this yearly salary".

Think about all the times you've told a recruiter/hiring manager your previous salary (don't, btw). Think about the HR teams and such at your company that have access.

Shrewd people can get this data, especially if they're willing to pay for it.

Most people I know just lie and add 20+ percent. If you are moving to a different market...they add 50 percent of the real salary.

There are market research firms that specialize in this area. It's useful to have such information, so it has monetary value - money presumably saved by underpaying or avoiding overpaying your workers. It's not something the average employee would afford in money and effort to research.

It's a good question how the data is obtained. Maybe through mutual data sharing agreements in exchange for access? Anyway, I've see such reports for my country, with very detailed breakdowns for job types, seniority, broad technology area, forecasts etc.

Companies use information services in order to pay appropriately. They neither want to overcompensate and drive higher wages nor do they want to under compensate and lose staff to competitors.

You can get pretty reasonable numbers, especially in the software industry, just using the freely available H1B visa salary data. All employers using these visas have to disclose the title, salary and location for an employee hired on one. In my experience for companies I'm familiar with these numbers are usually pretty accurate.

> https://h1bdata.info

Thanks so much, this is the career advice database I have been looking for for years. Whenever people ask me what they should do when they graduate, I have to base my response on broad government surveys that, for example, lump every single natural science in to a single salary category. With this, I can even make charts.

There are companies out there who organize salary surveys.

Every company pays in a bit to cover the costs/overhead with putting together a market report, and also submit the job titles and salaries of their workers. Possibly more data too, but I'm not certain. E.g. time with the company or years of relevant experience would be very handy.

Check out imercer.com. Depending on how you look at it it may start to look like a a middleman for cartels.

It’s complicated. Keeping salaries secret no doubt makes it more tenable to pay people who sit next to one another vastly different amounts. In a knowledge worker job where some people are way more productive than others, plus the same person’s productivity is highly variable over time, it’s probably good to pay people very different amounts of money over time, and also to have a complicated system of stock/bonus/promotions to incentivize better performance.

But companies aren’t just trying to maximize performance, they are also trying to minimize pay. It’s a lot easier to give someone a 20% raise if the starting salary is 50% lower.

Some people are underpaid because they don’t know how much they are worth, especially people from backgrounds where nobody makes this much money. Some people are overpaid because they are friends with the boss.

If a company is capable of paying $200k on average, salary transparency may make it harder for them to recruit people who are worth $500k. I’m paid a lot more than any company with a salary transparency calculator I’ve seen pays someone with my job title and experience. So I’m not going to try to work for those companies. I get the impression they are underpaying their employees, but their salary transparency allows them to recruit people who used to be even more underpaid.

I'd argue everyone gets paid more, as lower paid staff will churn more rapidly for higher paying positions, and in a tight labor market pay must rise to attract talent to roles.

With that said, you should always be interviewing for your next role, as you will never get a salary bump at an annual review near what you would make switching jobs. Always Be Interviewing. You are looking out for you first.

Why would you say that? I figured it would give employees more power in salary negotiations so I figured the salary would go up mostly.

If salaries are completely transparent, including external to the company, salary negotiation will all but disappear. You'll apply for a senior developer job, see that all the senior developers there make $95k (or whatever), and you're either okay with or you're not.

The flipside, which is largely why I am not in favor of legally enforced salary transparency, is that you ask for the salary range, they say $90-100k (or whatever), and you can justify why you should get 100 or 105 or 110 with examples. Or you can ask for $90k because you're happy with that and know you won't price yourself out of the position, or any number of other possibilities.

It just makes the entire process much less flexible, which I know a lot of us developers love, but in the business world it doesn't make much sense.

Salary transparency doesn’t require salary equality. Sure, if all Senior SWEs are making $95K, you just don’t apply there. In the more likely case, seniors are making a spread of $80-160K or $90-225K or whatever and you can decide where your likely value may land in or just outside that range.

>You'll apply for a senior developer job, see that all the senior developers there make $95k (or whatever), and you're either okay with or you're not.

But then one senior developer would claim that they are better or different than every other senior developer, and negotiation would return. Sure, Tim might be willing to accept the average rate of $95, but Jim worked as a staff engineer at Google, and so on.

That's not how it works out in real life. For example, in Congress all staffer salaries are open. There are still huge differences for the same position and people don't revolt over being paid less. They also don't jump ship when they find out.

The problem is that the information asymmetry implies that you might be worth 95k in the market, but you're much less likely to know that than the company making the offer, and accept 80k not realizing you've lost out on 15k. It gets further against you if they do things like asking your previous pay.

In general, you would expect salary negotiation to be worse for any given employee, because they have limited tools to research with compared to the hiring company, and far more limited (man) hours to do that research.

I would also imagine negotiation still exists, but now more emphasized on the extra benefits, eg PDOs, medical plans, bonuses, etc.

And ofc the added negative that the company can hide unfair practices, eg underpaying particular groups, or hiring someone's kid for 2x the pay, or whatever.

The main negative is that someone who was skilled at salary negotiations now makes less, but presumably most people aren't skilled, making it more a net positive. The biggest concern tbh is if the whole industry was overpaying its workers due to the fog of war, and this suddenly cleared things up, and employees across the board take a hit

> legally enforced

No, keep the Government out of this.

Because in most cases there are some or even many people who are available to work for less. The management then would argue that "you can't earn more than they do for the same work, everyone would have to get a raise but there is no justification for that". Secrecy makes it an individual discussion as a by-product.

In either case, managers would not entertain talk about a raise unless there ware actually not that many people willing to do the same work for less. So a secret negotiation allows them to hide that information from the rest of the workers and only compensate those aware of their market worth. An open negotiation would not lower compensation for the latter since they can always just quit, it would raise salaries for the less informed.

It would make the currently less informed more informed about this topic.

It’s not clear whether that would lead to them negotiating for more money.

We do have a couple examples of companies that are transparent with salaries or comp plans (Buffer, Gitlab, even places like Basecamp).

Nowhere with open published comp numbers has ever come close to my comp. Maybe it would work better as a system if everyone was opted in but the current data points I see don't support higher salaries for people with my skillset.