Personally, I would just forge one with a much higher pay level - but most people who play by the rules get screwed royally.
That's some universal truth right there.
A man was recently sentenced to 4 months of jail time because he lied about his salary to rent an apartment. [0]
[0]: https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/un-locataire-conda...
Also he only got caught because he wasn't paying the rent.
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I would prefer this system to the Equifax's panopticon to be honest.
The best system would be to have a third party insure your rent. So you would only communicate these kind of information to the third party of your choice with which you would have a legal contract including a privacy clause.
You have to legislate that away or legislate heavy property tax for real estate that is not used for personal living. Which might be sensible and necessary anyway if you look at price developments.
Closest I've had is current job, a global company, asking me first and last payslip of my previous employment, from which I was allowed/encouraged to retract information. I figure all they really wanted to check was employment and job title.
I've also almost always lied about my previous pay when asked (which recently has been less than before for some reason) to better match what I was seeking.
I toyed at the idea of some Federal government IT jobs. An agency was trying their best to pay well and the level was similar to a civilian who has a PhD or MD doing federal work but still only a little more than the median software dev salary.
Most government jobs aren't attractive anymore. I think the COLA was like net -2% last year. Pensions are mostly gone. Politics are raging lately.
The FBI postings I saw were way low. I'm already paid pretty lowly, so they are definitely not competitive ($75k was what I was seeing).
My limited/indirect experience on both sides of the "overqualified" thing is that it's usually a result of the employer feeling threatened this person will supplant them, or the prospective employee coming off as entitled or non-serious. Having a doctorate doesn't impinge on your ability to mow lawns, but if you're making sure everyone knows you're meant for better things, that's a problem.
Nobody has ever been able to define what equal pay for equal work means because every human being is different (skills, work ethic, ease of working with them, timeliness, negotiation skills, assertiveness, leadership ability etc. etc). So I can understand businesses playing it safe and just paying everybody less than trying to keep people who are good but more demanding of higher salaries.
Then wouldn't you see businesses fighting for it instead of against it?
A trend I noticed from all the EU regulation concerning business: you can be certain it will look like it's doing good for people and bad for business but it will just end up screwing common people and small businesses in favour of big businesses.
Think about VATMOSS: great, now Amazon can't charge Luxembourg VAT to customers in France BUT small businesses need to keep track of every EU country VAT, apply it and retain 3 pieces of evidence of the customer location. In practice, small business killed their eCommerces and moved to Amazon or just swapped their payment processors for Paddle (which charges way more but handles VAT for you).
Think about GDPR: it was a money transfer from people to lawyers and businesses are still doing whatever data transfer they need just by adding more text to their EULA which nobody reads.
We'll see how this one goes - but it makes sense that more transparency will have a chilling effect on the cost of high performers who know how to negotiate.
My response to this comment/question is always "it's not my problem you're underpaying everyone else."
It's true that it's also necessary to confirm that the job pays enough that it doesn't actually cause me hardship to work there, but of course the advertised range for the position was comfortably more than that. My operating costs are in fact slightly lower than the calculated "Cost of living" in this country.
From your entirely selfish point of view I'm sure being paid less than half as much as before would be totally unacceptable, but it wasn't a big concern for me. It's just a number. Good luck achieving happiness by making your number go up more.
"Performance management isn't an exact science and if everyone knew everyone else's pay, it would be total chaos and nothing would get done."
How's that work for the GS structure then? Or for union jobs in various sectors?
The only reason chaos would ensure is if there were extensive unexplainable and unfair practices.
In plenty of companies I have worked for, you pay quite a lot more than you want for a particular hire not necessarily because they are worth it but because you are desperate and they are nearly good enough. You generally don't get away with putting people's salaries down if they don't perform and if you did, they might leave ending with you being back in the mess.
This might be magnified in smaller companies but it could easily squew salary figures and depending on their sex, it could also make the figures look really wrong.
This might be "unfair" by one definition but it definitely happens and is one reason why it is hard to be transparent about wages. It can also create resentment if others knew that someone was overpaid.
In the US at least, employees are explicitly allowed by federal labor law to discuss compensation with each other. Employers generally can't retaliate against them for doing so (although like all labor laws that one is occasionally broken).
Can it be explained on the basis of value? If so, then good. If not, then it's likely unfair.
"It can also create resentment if others knew that someone was overpaid."
How can they be overpaid? The salary was set by the market. If the others are underpaid due to lagging the market, then they might just leave anyways. Their value has changed during their tenure and the company has not adequately adjusted for that to stay competitive in the market.
This should really end. Job hopping should not be necessary to get a decent wage.
It's rather suspicious that any company I've seen that was this evasive, the pay levels did leak eventually (and the speculations about who is paid what for what reason did bring total chaos) - and surprise! It turned out that performance management is not an exact science, but rather a game of "who's friends with the boss", completely regardless of performance.
Such a system will encourage rigid pay schedules (ie. all engineers with 5 years experience get X, non-negotiable). Rigid pay like that advantages poor performers, and good people leave.
The end result is a company giving pay transparency ends up either with a much bigger labor bill, or staffed by poor performers.
Governments requiring pay transparency though is a weaker effect - since it affects all businesses equally, and then there won't be anywhere for those good performers to jump to - although they may just leave the country.
Besides, salary is not the only thing that keeps people or makes them leave. High quality management, pleasant work environment, office location and many other things are also part of the decision making.
In fact, hiding salaries is a welfare scheme for low performing businesses. It will eventually degrade the quality of the society since it's not meritocratic and only sustainable due to information disparity between employer and employees.
The margins of a company shouldn't be coming from the employees tricked into working for less than they can get.
I think that a system based on secrecy and/or asymmetry of information won't last long, and in fact I think the current "chaos" happening in the labor market suggests that a majority caught on to what their "true" market value is despite salary secrecy and companies will have to deal with a bigger labor bill no matter what.
When it comes to salary pricing. Companies respond to "We need employees but can't find any" much more quickly than "Our compensations seems off market averages."
If such transparency is mandated throughout a region, the best talent can react in a number of ways: 1) They can leave the region. 2) They can all work in the same few companies, either those requireing top talent or consulting companies. (Or go solo.) 3) Employers can find alternative ways to compensate them. (Generous benefits, plenty of approved overtime, generes travel refunds or any other compensation that does not require reporting) 4) Top employees can scale back their effort, and either have more free time or do side hustles. Employers may even encourage this, as it may be preferrable to those people leaving.
Most of the above will make it harder to run highly innovative companies (presumably those that require top talent), and in the end, I suppose this will drag the economy of the entire region down.
I mean, it's fairly obvious that those are traits which contribute to building the social capital for obtaining a leadership position (which, from everything I've heard, tends to be more important than actually being a good fit for a given leadership role)
See also the Peter principle.
Those companies then run off to government saying "we can't employ anyone"
Fortunately more and more job listings on linked in are listing ballpark salaries so it's easy to ignore them, there's a few coming up which are reasonable salaries for what they want too IMO, so that's good.
They report a median of $116k.
study these 3 for 6 months and you will easily get over 200k.
PS I hate how people say 'easily' for salaries that are basically double the median for devs. If it was easy, everyone would have it.
For an interesting job I could be happy with £75k. In fact in the last 20 minutes I've had contact on linkedin for a pre-sales network architect, which sounds like it could be varied and relatively interesting.
However they only list "competitive" as the salary, which I would assume means £35k ($50k)
But the actual cost of labor (your compensation) is dictated by market forces just like any other commodity. Why would anyone hire you at $100k/year if they have someone else, just as good as you, that they can hire at $50k/year?
Your ability to negotiate is tied to your leverage, which more often than not is competing offers (including your current job). That has absolutely nothing to do with value, other than the upper bound I mentioned above.
I agree. But that's not incompatible with transparent pay. If this other person is producing more value and getting paid more, great. But show me how that value is twice my own. Those measurements should be going on in performance reviews. Largely, nobody cares to do this in a just way. It's basically just opinions, which are easily biased.
You could always make things easier with min wage regs etc by giving a low living base wage and then a generous bonus based on what you ship.
For large companies, that distinguish between "role" and "level", sure. But a LOT of companies aren't big enough to do that.
My dissatisfaction has nothing to do with that person's performance. In fact, I was glad they gave him a distinguished rating when we worked together - he deserved it. What I do have a problem with is that the department breaks enterprise policy by mandating a manager pick someone for a bad rating to balance out the high rating. They picked me. My dissatisfaction is solely with the broken policies and not with someone being justly rewarded.
This is not true in general.
Aw, that was one of the fun moments when getting my current job. I moved from private sector to public sector and they're like "You understand that the previous pay you listed is more than our boss's boss, the director of our entire org unit gets paid right?". Yes, yes I do. Which is why when you asked at interview "Why do you want this role?" I didn't say "Because I would like to get rich".
But overall this seems like a good idea. Pay transparency is a known good strategy. I remember years ago working for a huge international corporation I asked about pay transparency at one of those bogus "Ask us anything" board events and the CEO answered and he's like, "My pay is a matter of public record because that's the law here" and I'm like "Yes, and it's fine, you can see that now so why not the same for everybody else?" and of course he just deflected.
How "inability to give a straight answer on anything" and "refusal to make any meaningful decisions" came to be considered good leadership traits is a mystery to me, but I do know how much it pays so that's nice.