I don't think it's a good idea to dictate fixed salaries, but it's a great idea to make them transparent. It would be nice seeing how much the best employee earns, so you could use them as a role model. It would also be nice to see if the slacker brother of your boss is earning accordingly to his performance.
This is absolutely true.
However, in practice, while there are certainly workplaces where differences in pay are primarily due to differences in actual productive output and value to the team/company, there are also many, many workplaces where the differences in pay are entirely due to either better negotiation skills (which have absolutely nothing to do with the work in question), or how much the people deciding on the pay like the workers in question....including how much the workers in question toe the party line and are willing to sacrifice and abuse themselves for the sake of the company.
In a case like this, what is responsible is to acknowledge the good-faith cases, and put rules in place (like pay transparency) to help fight against the bad-faith and abusive cases. "We should allow companies the freedom to continue to abuse their employees, because some companies instead use that freedom to reward good employees" is not a particularly compelling argument, at least to me.
That really depends on the magnitude of the two problems. "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater," "The cure is worse than the disease," etc.
However, at least from my perspective, the harm caused by allowing employers to continue to abuse the information asymmetry is significant and real, while the idea that keeping people in the dark makes it somehow more likely that good employers will reward good employees seems to have no rational basis in fact. (It is, I believe, much more likely that good employers will reward good employees regardless of whether they are required to disclose employee compensation.)
Thus, unless you wish to claim an ideological argument of some sort (which I would say should always be superseded by evidence of actual harm to actual people on the other side), the only remaining argument I've personally seen against pay transparency always appears to boil down to "I assume I must be paid better than the people around me, because of my obviously better skills at $JOB and/or negotiation, and I'm afraid that if everyone knew they would be jealous of me."
Dynamic pay doesn't always reward the very best, and certainly not proportionally. It also rewards the person the boss likes, well connected people, and people that are just more skilled at gaming the system.
True - but job posts can be occupied by interchangeable pieces; some are overachievers, but all meet a minimum requirement. "Software Engineer I" in department A can be filled by any suitable candidate, and the budget maxes out at $XXX,000. If you're being paid less than this, the employer should tell you why (commitment,disposition, ambition, networking, etc).
Wage transparency does not lead to fixed salaries, it just removes the information asymmetry between employer and worker, making it easier for workers to negotiate a better wage. Employers can still refuse to introduce pay parity, and many employees probably won’t care that much.
If a company tells you how much they pay, they are also telling every other company how much they will pay. It's basically colluding to keep wages low.
You are worth what somebody will pay you.
I don't get the "it's a person's own responsibility" bit. Why should it be someone's responsibility to divine their true value via time-consuming interviews, rather than simply comparing what companies are willing to pay?
But yes, I don't understand why a company would not at least advertise a minimum of what they are willing to pay to get a candidate to apply. Perhaps they are happy with the candidates they are getting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion
Just because Walmart says on their website that they sell an item at $5, does not imply they have made an agreement with other sellers to also sell at $5. Nor does Carvana saying they will buy a car at $20k imply an agreement with other buyers to also buy at $20k.
Is the claim also that at an auction, when people bid on something and yell out a number, they are “secretly” telling other bidders to not bid more?
Markets all over the world for thousands of years work on the basis of buyers telling sellers what they are willing to pay, and sellers telling buyers what they are willing to sell for. The whole process of a buyer and seller coming to an agreement on price is central to determining movements of supply and demand curves.
If either buyers or sellers have sufficient control to dictate prices, then that is a separate issue of there not being sufficient buyers and sellers.
But price transparency always results in a better allocation of resources and a healthier marketplace.
I think it would fine for companies to advertise a sticker price for a job, but nobody expects to actually earn that, you negotiate up from there.
I know a few people who paid more than sticker price for a car in the last year.
Companies can advertise min, max, whatever. The person accepting is going to be deciding based on how good the total offer is versus somewhere else. But if a company knows which way prices are moving since they do a lot more buying of labor than an individual does of selling of labor, then the company has an advantage. Reducing this advantage helps level the playing field.
However, it also speaks to what is valued at that workplace. This matters not just for the "emotional" purposes, but for the implications it has for how the workplace will evolve over time due to those values.
If you are someone for whom personal relationships, negotiating skills, and networking matter more than skill at the job, perhaps you think that a place where a lazy but well-connected developer is paid significantly more, and management refuses to change this, is ideal.
If, on the other hand, you are someone for whom competence, productivity, and ability to do the job assigned is most important...then perhaps you will find that such a workplace will become less and less friendly to you over time.
Having more data in a negotiation is never a bad thing, having less always is.
Strangely, the US tends to pay more than any other country for the work, which is why those who live in other countries would rather move to the US and its non-transparent pay system.
Pay transparency creates commodization of jobs which will only lead to the pay dropping rather than rising. Opaque pricing is great for sellers and the sellers in every market. In the job market the sellers are employees, not employers.