I agree it should be done, but the main downside is that a single pay number lacks a lot of nuance. At companies with open pay policies, a lot of times you will see one person complaining that another person is making more than them, and then a long meeting has to take place where all the special skills of that other person are explained. Having to do that repeatedly would get onerous.

Also, it's bad for small business owners, because then the large businesses could see what they are paying and much more easily poach employees.

Edit: To clarify, I'm absolutely in favor of pay transparency laws. But any time you make a government policy, there are always winners and losers. It's always a balance between how much you're harming the losers and who they are. In this case, the losers would be the businesses and their owners, which is all that I'm pointing out. But I'd say that the employees should be the winners here, and I say this as a business owner myself.

> Also, it's bad for small business owners, because then the large businesses could see what they are paying and much more easily poach employees.

That sounds a bit like (apologies for the strawman): "small business needs to be able to exploit employees to survive."

If small business can't survive without that, perhaps the problem lies elsewhere?

This is a double-edged sword, though.

For employees, working at a large company that has already achieved economies of scale is probably a better paycheck -- they have the budget to be able to pay you better.

For society, though, we definitely don't want those small businesses (which don't have the same efficiencies or economies of scale) to be boxed out by large corporations across the board.

Not that this means that we shouldn't have pay transparency (people can and should be able to make their own decisions), but the inability of small businesses to match the salaries of huge corporations is pretty unavoidable.

I agree, the small business has to bring something else to the table, such as greater scope of responsibility or quicker execution.

Transparent pay is great for the employees, but it's still a downside to the company.

The employee would benefit from more transparency, but that doesn't mean it is exploitation.

Not

> Also, it's bad for small business owners, because then the large businesses could see what they are paying and much more easily poach employees.

I don't follow - to rephrase what you're saying, it's bad for small business owners because their (underpaid) employees will be paid more by (larger) other businesses?

Sounds like the employees of said businesses will overwhelming benefit if what you're saying is true.

Absolutely. It would be great for the employees, just not the businesses.

Ah, I misunderstood - I thought you were arguing that was a downside for an employee. Apologies.

This sounds like grasping at straws, I mean your arguments against pay transparency is that there would be some more meetings and that somehow this would enable big companies to easier poach employees of small business? I don't know where you work, but discussions about salary are such a small blib in the overall number of meetings, that even if (and that's a big if) pay transparency would increase the number of those meetings by a factor 10, it would hardly register for the vast number of employees amongst the flood of other stupid meetings.

And it would make poaching of employees from small businesses easier because they suddenly know about the salaries that they didn't have a clue about before? I don't know what you think the recruiters at of the big players do all day, I would bet they have very good ideas what all the other players pay. If anything it would help small businesses who don't have the money to pay top recruiters.

I agree with everything you said. Like I said, I think it's a good policy, but there are downsides, just not to the employee.

Federal mandates are non-starters politically in America, for better or for worse, especially in regards to speech and privacy. There is a massive cohort of Americans who vehemently oppose the government mandating what they must publicly share about themselves. This doesn't seem feasible.

this is why we are a Republic of States, and we're supposed to care more about state and local elections than the Federal ones, but it seems like nobody learns this from high school civics class anymore (myself included).

A California state mandate on pay disparity would probably be generally well-received, for example.

exactly! this is why our Republican (not the party) system of government is so great, different states can try different things and other states can learn from each other, both in what to do, what not to do, and even "well, that worked for that state, but I don't think it'll work well for us." it's a neat system, and one that I feel is increasingly underappreciated, as everyone wants all legislation to be done at the federal level.

I don't understand the privacy rebuttals. Pay transparency doesn't mean your personal salary is identifiable.

It depends on the size and diversity of the company. If your company size is small and they list 10 tech leads and only one has 20 years experience, or a masters, or is female, then it's pretty easy to work that back to them. They've shown similar things for anonymous medical records not being so anonymous.

So larger populations and smaller number of attributes would probably make it better, but not foolproof.

No matter what the company will know everyone's salaries. The question is mainly whether you want to be ignorant, or not. Usually these things (at least with the government) don't list experience, or educational attainment.

"Usually these things (at least with the government) don't list experience, or educational attainment."

Seems pretty useless without that. Those are huge factors.

"The question is mainly whether you want to be ignorant, or not."

That's not the only question. The other question mostly being discussed here is if you want anyone to be able to know your salary by working backwards from the published list, specifically in small companies.

> Seems pretty useless without that. Those are huge factors.

The point is to allow for more transparency, not perfect transparency.

> That's not the only question. The other question mostly being discussed here is if you want anyone to be able to know your salary by working backwards from the published list, specifically in small companies.

In practice this doesn't matter, but even if this were an issue you could exempt employers with fewer than 100 employees.

"In practice this doesn't matter"

How so? Even at 100 employees you might only have 5 tech leads. So the population of the subgroups matter.

"The point is to allow for more transparency, not perfect transparency."

What can we actually do with that transparency if it doesn't have the attributes necessary for meaningful comparison?

The point is to create a range in which both current and prospective employees can refer to. Obviously it's not perfect as that would require all information which would be a privacy concern.

Are you arguing knowing nothing is better than knowing something?

"Are you arguing knowing nothing is better than knowing something?"

No one is saying that. That is a gross misinterpretation of my statements.

"The point is to create a range in which both current and prospective employees can refer to."

A range based on what? The point being discussed here is equal pay. Ranges dont help if you have all the women at the low end and the men at the high end, hypothetically. If you just want to post salary ranges by position you can do that without publishing individual salaries.

Maybe you should have specified that.

Even with that said, I work at a small enough company where anonymous salaries could still easily be associated with an individual, and I would still not like that, for privacy reasons.

Specified what? Pay transparency has never meant personally identifiable salaries.

In the interest of debate, I don't quite understand them either. But America is a country I have never fully understood!

It’s already mandated if you’re a government employee, which millions of people are.

Privacy would be one downside. I'm not sure I want my friends, acquaintances, home contractors, ect knowing how much I make.

Pay transparency doesn't necessarily mean you're personally identifiable. That aside, what are the downsides?

Not necessarily, but it is probably the most common way it has been implemented in the US, and a potential downside depending on implementation.

Another downside is that it could release competitive information from private companies.

Sure, and the upside is a strengthened position as a prospective employee. As an employee or prospective employee to a new organization, what's the downside?

If you are currently underpaid, it could reduce you leverage with the prospective employer. I have 2Xed my pay because a new employer didn't know my current rate.

They still wouldn't know your rate. As I mentioned before, pay transparency isn't necessarily personally identifiable. Hypothetically you could've 4X'd your rate. Maybe your 2X rate is actually a lowball. Who's to say?

yeah, it really all comes down to implementation. How much information is available an to whom.

Being able to look up anyone by name in a public registry and see their exact salary would probably be a worst case This is the current state for public employees.

Anonymized data for companies larger than a certain size with job class (like levels.fyi[1]) would probably be a best case. However, if you want to get meaningful information about sex, race, age, & gender, this information quickly becomes identifiable for even moderate companies.

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&tr...

Given the amount of tracking that's possible today, I think that anybody who cared would be able to easily determine your exact salary if the salary of every position at a company were published.

IDK in your country, in mine the downside was that we all knew such pay gap is mostly non-existant, so they mandated a pay gap law but data is locked under trade unions gatekeeping.

Of course it doesn't exist, because if it did any CEO could say "let's hire women instead of men and save 25%"

In my country most salaries are mandated with trade-union agreements, even variable compensations. Only very specific and niche cases behave outside that framework.

If any trade union or person believed that there was a real pay gap in any company, they could sue and win if true. Even way before current law.

With the new law, it's even easier, as they get access to all the microdata basically.

But nothing lands on courts yet.

If people were rational, bigotry wouldn't exist in the first place.

By this logic, racial and gender pay gaps should never have existed. Why didn't any visionary CEO in America hire blacks instead of whites in 1950 and save 50% on labor?

Because they were also kept out of the schools that would give them the qualifications to work those jobs. No cost savings if your engineer or accountant was never trained. So companies hired them for the menial jobs which paid less universally.

No black engineers or accountants in 1950? Whats the pay gap between you and a knowledgeable employee?

Not that there were zero, just that they were rare due to entry barriers. If you have evidence to the contrary I would love to see it rather than listen to your pathetic attempt at a clever put down.

You're the one who said there were none.

Now you admit there were, my original question remains. Why didn't any CEO hire them at a white firm at half pay and make a bundle?

I don't know, but I don't find it hard to furnish ideas. Colleges used to try to ensure they didn't produce more professionally qualified graduates than there were entry-level positions for. Perhaps colleges only graduated fewer black students than there were openings in black-owned enterprises?

Maybe you can learn reading comprehension. In the context of a company hiring only minorities in professional roles there were effectively none.

Again, how about some evidence to the contrary?

I presume you are from Spain, which indeed is one of the top countries in the Global Gender Gap Index [1] but its unadjusted gender pay gap still sits at 11.9% (2019 provisional) [2]. Yes it's called "unadjusted" for a reason (gender pay gap is a broad phenomenon and can't be described with a single statistics and that's why we have the Index) but it is far from "non-existant".

[1] http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2021.pdf (14th place in 2021)

[2] https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=sdg...

Trade Unions have access to companies microdata now. If there such pay gap, there's no excuse now.

I don't really want to get into a large discussion, but I know the data sources of these studies as I used them pretty often, and you'll have to be pretty creative, either with data or with definitions.

This issue for me is very linked with my distrust of academia, is not just this issue.

I went to uni (sociology) in my mid 20s and I wasn't impressed with the ethical standards of the field, let's say that.

Gender pay gap is not just about the wage equality in the same companies (AFAIK this is what the 2021 law concerns). It can for example also arise from the selective employment, which effectively segregates the labor force by gender. If my reading of the Global Gender Gap Index is correct, the disparity of estimated earned income in Spain is 34.9% (score 0.651), which suggests this scenario.

> I went to uni (sociology) in my mid 20s and I wasn't impressed with the ethical standards of the field, let's say that.

This honestly sounds like conspiracy believers. If you feel a particular statistics is flawed (perfectly possible by the way) you ought to give a counter evidence, not your anecdote.

> selective employment

That's mostly an effect of what women study, and motherhood.

There's a discussion about nature/nurture, the gender paradox and all that behind those figures.

> This honestly sounds like conspiracy believers. If you feel a particular statistics is flawed (perfectly possible by the way) you ought to give a counter evidence, not your anecdote.

I don't really want to vent out publicly here, I already did too much, but someone influential in this field was my professor. This professor admitted, maybe without being aware of so, that the results of the research being conducted in that moment were being massaged to fit the hypothesis.

Look, IDK, my nick can already be linked to my real persona, so understand I don't want to get into details here. In fact I'm not sure if I should be posting this, as it could affect future job prospects.

> That's mostly an effect of what women study, and motherhood.

I secretly wanted to see the actual arguments based on numbers since I'm very aware that the global survey like this can fail to account for domestic contexts, but yeah, typical canned arguments.

I personally don't care who you are (except for your country in question), but if you feel unsafe about the discussion after all you'd rather not talk about it at all. In the other words, expect the criticism if you keep posting those typical canned arguments.

> That's mostly an effect of what women study, and motherhood.

Have you seen data from companies showing total comp of each individual? Every study I’ve seen shows discrimination after accounting for differences in education. I’ve known many women in different workplaces that were not being paid equally.

Paycheck transparency, paycheck+stock option transparency, or transparency of all benefits? Didn't Steve Jobs have a salary of $1?

The downside is that it's a tyrannical intrusion into private business.

Private business operates under the umbrella of government regulations and if they didn’t you and I would have a much worse life.

Try an argument that's structurally capable of distinguishing between good and bad ideas.

The self proclaimed guys that are at the same time 10X devs and 10x negociaters think that all the simpletons will be envious and hate on them. It could be that some of the double 10x guys are not paid 10x times as "simpletons" (most of the time this ones are stuck to cleanup the 10x devs garbage output)

How much money do you make?

I would answer this, but it would give my potential next employer the opportunity to lowball me.

This would not be the case if the pay transparency that parent describes were already a thing, because I would have the same ability to check the salaries of that company.

But without that mandate happening, whoever moves first loses. That's why salary transparency should be mandated, because otherwise no one has any motivation to move, so no one will.

This is such a stupid retort. I'm totally fine with my salary being public iff everyone's salary is public.

Start from yourself.

Would what someone claims online make any difference to you?

The point is to drive home how they might feel about publicity announcing and verifying their income for the world to see.

Pay transparency does not necessarily mean a specific individual is tied with a specific amount of money.

Yes, but in many cases it does (not-huge companies with enough data on role, experience, location to disambiguate)...

I really would not want this. I already compare myself to my peers and feel the pressure enough. I don't want to have the salary figures as an extra metric to obsess about. I think it would lead to a lot of resentment and be generally unproductive

I'm sorry, but you'd rather be ignorant to potential pay discrepancies not in your favor because you might just feel bad?

If you were the best person on your team and were being paid the least you wouldn't want to know? I honestly don't understand your view.

People, to the great benefit of companies, tend to actually negotiate up front and then not want to think about money as long as they consider it “enough” for their lifestyle, at least not wanting to revisit it on a weekly or monthly basis.

It allows people to fool themselves that they do what they do for something other than money, and or they’re afraid of any conflict in the workplace (and thereby instability).

Then don't look at them.

Certainly depends on if where you fall in the system; are you taking advantage of getting paid more than those around you with no transparency or could you benefit from transparency because you're lacking information?

While I agree with this perspective, I also feel like there's a lot of cultural baggage around this that makes a transition it a hard sell for the time being.

> A federal mandate on pay transparency would put an end to all of the unequal pay issues once and for all.

Were you...being serious?

I wouldn't want everyone to know my income. Have you thought about all repercussions of that transparency?