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Infinite Karma posted:Labor spontaneously organizing to bargain for better wages and benefits is extremely rare, so it seems to me that a top-down approach is better to even the playing field. My proposal is this: what if a law made it mandatory that every employee's compensation was openly available to all other employees? From the CEO to the Janitor - wages, salaries, bonus structures, benefits, and perks are plainly listed out. There is a huge cultural taboo (at least in the U.S.) about discussing pay, especially with coworkers, and a law telling us that we should discuss it, especially with the specter of employer disapproval seems pointless. One correction: employees discussing wages is already protected by law, and retaliation against employees due to such discussions is already prohibited. That actually gives a hint toward the problem with your proposal, which is that it doesn't actually do anything nor does it empower employees to do anything. You're not going to solve unfair pay just by shouting "hey, employees, look at how unfair your wages are". People already know pay rates differ from person to person, the question is how to change that. Mirthless posted:Telling people how much you make in my workplace will get you fired. They told us that on day 1, since we were hired in at a higher rate than other people doing essentially the same job. They were very up front about how they didn't want fairness in the workplace when it came to wages. They can tell you that all they want, but it's illegal for them to actually do it. They're just counting on the fact that you don't know that. Most workers don't know their rights, so employers can run roughshod over them with nothing but empty threats.
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Apr 16, 2014 03:52
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Mirthless posted:They can actually do that in Oklahoma. Really? They shouldn't be able to; regardless of what Oklahoma law says, federal law prohibits it and that takes precedence. I suppose if they're small enough, federal labor law wouldn't apply to them, but I think HP's just a bit over that line.
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Apr 16, 2014 04:07
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Mirthless posted:What would I do if I got fired? I don't have the money to afford the kind of legal representation required to battle so-called at will employment. Beyond that, I don't see what is legally protected about talking about my wages with others. "Employment at will" is a bitch. You would submit a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board, which would then sue the employer on your behalf for free. The case takes some time, so if you actually get fired you're going to have to find another job in the meantime, but if you win the usual damages are retroactive back pay (as if you had never been fired and continued working there at the same salary the entire time) times three, which is just threatening enough to keep most companies in line. It's as legally protected as anything can be, covered under employees' right to collectively organize, which exists even in non-union states and includes many other little-known protections such as the right to complain about work to your coworkers. That's right - your boss cannot legally fire you for bitching about working conditions in the breakroom, as long as no customers are in earshot.
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Apr 16, 2014 06:57
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Mirthless posted:While I don't necessarily completely disagree with what you're saying I think using a woman as an example in this case is incredibly disingenuous because the current system of wage secrecy hurts women more than anyone else. For every one woman in the situation you cited, there is a hundred more being disenfranchised who don't know it and won't know it as long as wages remain secret. I don't think wage secrecy is directly responsible for hurting anyone. After all, the reason we have Congressional efforts to solve gender pay disparities is because even when women find out they're being paid less, there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. Companies don't try to block pay discussion because they fear all the employees coming to them and asking for raises, they do it to prevent the lower-paid employees from becoming resentful toward the higher-paid employees (leading to drama and efficiency losses) and to prevent the lower employees from going "hey, all our wages suck, there's no real upward mobility here, let's unionize and fight for better wages for our job title". And coincidentally, while it's by no means perfect, unions have invented pretty much the only pay system that doesn't pay women less than equally-experienced men in the same jobs, though it's not a popular pay system among under-30s with repressed libertarian feelings and delusions of grandeur.
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Apr 16, 2014 14:50
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enbot posted:It's hardly just libertarians who dislike a system where pay and job title are based almost entirely on seniority. The decline of unions also seems to be in large part from the changing to an information economy- those jobs seem naturally harder and make less sense to unionize than factory work. This stems from factory work comprising of jobs that are in large part similar- it's a lot less likely to have large differences in output and worth in a factory job when compared to something like Microsoft. Why are information jobs less sensible to unionize? The only real reason I've heard (besides "some workers just suck so much compared to my brilliant and flawless skill that I'd be making three times what they do for the the same job if not for BIG UNIONS") is that information workers see themselves as superior to other workers and believe that unions are only for the poor, uneducated lower workers - basically, a status thing. Which would explain quite well why low-status information fields (like teaching) were able to unionize. The reason young people switch jobs so often is precisely because companies don't reward seniority and in fact encourage job-switching by offering higher salaries for a position to new employees than to people promoted from inside. If you go ten years without switching jobs, you'll find your pay lagging significantly behind the market value for what you ended up doing. So young people have to switch jobs every few years in order for their salary to keep up with their responsibilities. It's not just something they do because they like it. Even the well-compensated still have plenty to gain from unions, and if all the young workers are well-educated and well-compensated then I don't see how they could possibly lose out by forming a union. Maybe if they're all just waiting for a chance to double-cross and abandon their fellow workers at the first opportunity, throwing the union under the bus in order to get the raise they feel they deserve? I dunno. I feel like anti-union arguments get awfully close to "welfare queens" rhetoric sometimes, in that they both acknowledge the ideas might possibly be solid if not for a vast and entirely fictional army of lazy incompetents who'd milk the systems for all they're worth and drag down us motivated hardworking
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Apr 16, 2014 19:01
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PT6A posted:I'd say teaching is a better candidate for unionization because measurable outputs don't correspond to inputs in any real sense, not because it's low-status. When you can measure the outputs, and they have a strong connection to the skill of the employee, and especially if there's a high variance in utility between a highly-skilled and a low-skilled worker in the same position, unionization starts becoming less tempting. When the outputs are measurable and vary considerably, that is in fact where unionization is most important, since the union can rely on those metrics to incorporate performance into payscales. The reason strict seniority payscales are so common in union jobs is because they typically want to eliminate subjectivity from pay and firing decisions as much as possible (because it leads to bias and unfair treatment) but the fields don't have any objective measures that can be used and have enough variance to be worth counting.
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Apr 16, 2014 21:02
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PT6A posted:Or the employer can do the same thing, since it's in their best interest to pay their top performers well in order to retain them. Unless those top performers are female, black, Hispanic, or even Asian, in which case they'll get inferior pay, typically because employers won't rely solely on the objective data and will instead add subjective factors which function mainly as a way to express their subconscious biases.
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Apr 16, 2014 21:13
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on the left posted:A big reason why it wouldn't work so well is the low levels of capital needed to start a competitive company, and the short lifetime of the average tech company. If you can watch a company rise and fall within 5-10 years, promises of a 30 year tenure and retirement package don't really mean much. White collar unions don't have to fight for the same exact specific things as blue collar unions. The point of a union isn't to fight for big retirement packages and seniority-based pay, it's to fight for better working conditions and fair treatment of workers - the latter of which is particularly needed in the tech industry. The few women in the tech industry get treated like poo poo. A tech union would adjust to the needs of tech workers, rather than giving 30-year pensions to workers whose bosses will sell or destroy the company within five years.
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Apr 17, 2014 02:06
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drilldo squirt posted:I don't understand why their arn't more unions like that in america. Anti-union rhetoric, propaganda, and misinformation has been engrained deeply enough into our culture over the past generation that the population has basically lost interest in unionizing - white collar workers regard lovely working conditions as a chance to impress their bosses by showing how dedicated and hardworking they are, convincing themselves that enduring 80-hour weeks with no overtime or bonus pay for an indefinite period will impress capital into giving them a gigantic raise because they, as well-educated white males, think the world is a perfect meritocracy that rewards hard work above all else. No one wants to complain or advocate for change because they think doing so will just demonstrate to your boss that you aren't hard-working or dedicated enough to move up the ladder and become a megarich captain of industry.
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Apr 17, 2014 06:14
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icantfindaname posted:In general I don't see much effective difference between vigorously enforcing current labor law stipulating you can't be fired for discussing wages and making wages public, besides of course ease of enforcement. Seems to me if you're opposed to one you'd necessarily be opposed to both. There's a major difference - protecting workers' rights to discuss wages means only the workers themselves will know the wages in their specific company, while publicly posted wages exposes the data to the public, which allows scientists and activists to pull and compare that salary data to get more accurate looks at the wage gap. Still, that's just data; it just reveals the problem, it doesn't fix it.
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Apr 17, 2014 17:16
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Mornacale posted:But in general, if two companies have their wage scales totally open to prospective new employees, then how is that not going to push the scales upward? Why would it? Wages aren't going to go up just because one company pays better than another company, except in hotspots where no company can get enough of a limited worker pool in the market, in which case wage growth happens regardless of whether wages are publicly available (see: finance, Silicon Valley). Even then, non-salary benefits like health insurance, catered lunches, ball pits, casual workplace cultures, and so on are a great way to muddle the waters. The idea of public wage databases fixing pay unfairness just seems to me to depend on the same magical thinking as the invisible hand - it seems to assume that the market would regulate itself and all problems would disappear if information was made free enough and regulations were removed. People are taking for granted that it'll work, but I haven't really seen anyone coherently explain just how public wage data will fix the fact that, on average, women make less than 80% of what a man in the same job does. Mornacale posted:I'm pretty sure that if a company starts raising its salaries for men and not for women, and all this data is public, it's not going to go well. I certainly don't think that something like this is going to eliminate pay discrimination--only the destruction of systems of oppression in general will do that--but I don't think that it would somehow help white men and leave everyone else behind. How won't it go well? What concrete consequences would the company face? Unfair treatment of women is already well-known and doesn't seem to hurt companies much. Injustices and inequities being made public, by themselves, won't cause enough backlash to force the company to change its behavior. Companies are perfectly fine paying some people less than other people, and the workers for the most part know that it's happening. They keep wages secret to keep morale up among the lower-paid workers, not because they'd be forced to equalize wages.
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Apr 18, 2014 20:39
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Xandu posted:Seriously? Blatant wage discrimination against women across the board as he's describing is illegal and a great way to get sued. It also doesn't account for a large part of the wage gap, but that's a separate issue. It's not a separate issue at all, because the employee has to prove that the pay difference is because they're women and not for other reasons such as differences in skill, effort, responsibility, merit, output quality or quantity, or any other factor besides gender. Technically it's the employer's responsibility to prove this, but it's easier for them to make a case for it than it is for the employee to debunk that case - especially if the subject of debate is widened to all women's salaries at the company rather than just one. And since the Supreme Court has smacked down class action pay discrimination cases, each and every female employee has to sue separately for their particular case of pay discrimination. I'm not saying it won't work sometimes, but going to the trouble of making all this wage data accessible and then relying on individual employees to sue to fix it seems like a non-optimal way to fix the problem, focused more on changing as little as possible and hoping the market will sort it out than on efficiently and effectively solving the problem.
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Apr 18, 2014 21:37
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Sucrose posted:Doesn't the wage gap nearly disappear when you compare childless men and women in the same field with the same education, etc? Seems to me that they ought to be investigating why women seem to be bearing the brunt of childcare costs career-wise and seeing what can be done to fix it. Nop. The gap is much smaller for single childless women with the same job and education, but they're still at a 6% pay disadvantage. Which is better than the 23% pay disadvantage for women as a whole, but I consider it important to note that although the researchers can get the gap to shrink by controlling for various factors and singling out specific demographics, they're never able to make it disappear - no matter how they attempt to massage the data, some of the wage gap always remains. As for why women get penalized for marrying and having children and men don't, that's got more to do with biased attitudes and outdated gender roles than with any real factors that can be addressed. People simply assume that when a couple has a child, the woman will be more committed to that child than to the workplace and will lose productivity and cut back on hours to spend more time with the kid, while men will work harder than ever in oder to fulfill their role of providing for the family. The people writing the paychecks are largely convinced that thse stereotypical gender roles are in fact unshakeable ~biotruths~, so they cut back on the woman's hours and take her off the promotion list so she won't be doing anything important when those so-called ~maternal instincts~ kick in. Of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy - since she's been relegated to boring shitwork and is no longer getting promotions or even decent raises, the woman's productivity declines and she sometimes quits, which the manager/HR person blames on the child and uses that result to validate their sidelining the woman in the first place. Same sort of thing happens with marriage and such: stereotypical gender roles dictate that the man works to provide for the family while the woman stays home to cook and clean, and a lot of people still buy into that to some extent, so the instant a female worker gets engaged, managers start expecting them to quit or start working less any day now, and treat them accordingly. How do we fix that? Short of removing a considerable amount of subjectivity from the hiring and salary determination processes, I don't think it's feasible. Bigotry is a difficult problem to fix, and much like with institutional racism, many of the people involved either don't even know they're doing it or have come up with reasons that they refuse to believe are wrong.
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Apr 19, 2014 08:47
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Branman posted:For some reason people in D&D think that the only valid way to land a job is to submit anonymous applications online. Finding jobs through networking isn't a problem that needs to be stamped out. It's great if your family is well-off enough to have those kinds of connections or you went to an Ivy League, but the size of your useful network is pretty much directly proportionate to your income, so it tends to lead to jobs being snatched away from the lower class to be given to the wealthy. Also, the personal connection tends to lead to the person getting more generous pay than someone of their experience might otherwise be getting in that position.
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Apr 19, 2014 16:14
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Branman posted:You're really strawmanning what actually happens in real life and only focusing on top-tier jobs. Going to an Ivy League school or being wealthy isn't going to help you network into an average blue collar job. The average case is a lot closer to "I know a guy in the local union/shop/etc. so I can get an interview because someone vouched for me." Poorer people are less likely to know someone at a decent company with the authority to inform hiring/firing decisions, especially early in their career. When you grew up in a lovely neighborhood and went to a lovely college, you've got a much less useful network because most of the people you know are working shitjobs like mopping floors. When you don't have much opportunity, odds are good none of the people you know have much opportunity either. Hell, almost the entire value of fancy colleges like Harvard is in having the opportunity to network with the upper class.
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Apr 19, 2014 17:10
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mugrim posted:If you're in the US military, you can know all of your coworkers pay down to the Penny (unless you're a moron), and somehow there aren't massive riots over it. Same thing for the vast majority of public workers. Isn't military pay strictly tied to a highly-defined payscale where two people in the same service and division with the same rank, job, and responsibilities are always paid the same? The reason the military doesn't have a pay discrimination problem isn't because of pay transparency, it's because there's a solidly defined pay structure and commanders don't get to deviate from it and pay people different amounts based on how much they like them. The problem with eliminating pay discrimination in the private job market is the same as the problem with eliminating discrimination from hiring and firing - employers can pay anyone more or less for any reason (up to and including "because I felt like it") except discrimination, so just showing that female workers are paid less than male workers isn't incontrovertible proof of pay discrimination - if the company isn't stupid, they'll come up with an excuse and present (or fake) the evidence to back it up. While this doesn't always work, it works often enough outside of the most blatant cases, as long as no one was dumb enough to openly admit the discrimination (many people do, which suggests that existing discrimination law isn't much deterrent). Relying on the victims to individually sue isn't going to eliminate the wage gap, just as individual lawsuits for abuses aren't going to be enough to eliminate racism from the criminal justice system. Branman posted:While we're saying that networking at your university is inherently unjust and is nepotism, can we also shout down poor black people networking through their churches as nepotism and unjust? Poor black people networking through their local churches are mostly going to be networking with poor black people, while rich white men networking at Harvard are going to be networking with other rich white men. It just reinforces the class divisions that already exist and segregates opportunities by demographic. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Apr 19, 2014 |
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Apr 19, 2014 19:51
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mugrim posted:The easiest way to demonstrate discrimination is to have access to your coworkers pay so that you can demonstrate that despite the same performance, you are getting paid significantly less. To demonstrate this, you don't just need pay data, you also need performance data, and it needs to be accurate, nonbiased performance data - which often doesn't exist. An unspoken policy to make sure the tone of performance reviews lines up with how much more/less someone is getting paid than the baseline would basically be a license of immunity from discrimination lawsuits, pay data or no pay data, though most companies aren't quite that savvy yet. mugrim posted:Honestly, getting employers to look at people's performance so they can justify a bump/promotion instead of who is 'a team player' and 'feels right for your gut' would be a HUGE step forward. I agree...unfortunately, I don't think anything can do that short of banning employers from using the latter, and even then they'll try to game any evaluation method not totally and exclusively dependent on hard numbers. Hell, they'll even try to game the hard numbers, but they have a lot less leeway there and it's a lot easier to catch than pure unmitigated bullshit is. wateroverfire posted:Goons. Man. Looking at previous experience, I guess? It's a tough question because humans aren't beep boop robots whose productivity is the same at all times and at all tasks. I personally don't think there is a way to sort the best worker out of a candidate pool. No one's been able to find a decent way; Google's been collecting the factors used in interview judgement and comparing them to employee performance down the road and finding that basically nothing in the hiring process has any correlation at all to employee performance. However, what you're asking is somewhat of a trick question, because a third-party recommendation doesn't help you find the most productive person in a pool of candidates. It just guarantees that the person being recommended (or one of their friends, or one of their family members) isn't so much of an rear end in a top hat that people will refuse to do them favors. Even if the recommender has actually worked with the person they recommended or seen their completed work (they often haven't), that still doesn't guarantee they're better than all of the other applicants. That aside, sometimes doing what's best or easiest for employers isn't necessarily what's best for society. Many employers feel that having a blanket policy of excluding convicted felons will help get the objectively best workers, but the way things are going, that's probably going to end up being illegal within a few years. on the left posted:You can't use a general aptitude test, which would seem like a pretty good test for a lot of white-collar jobs. If a general aptitude test is consistently having racially disparate results, then either some races just consistently have higher aptitude at everything than others (and if you honestly believe that's true, get the gently caress out) or there's a problem with the test.
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Apr 20, 2014 17:42
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rscott posted:How is more information available in the labor market a bad thing, seriously I don't understand that. A market's efficiency relies on actors having as close to perfect information as possible right? Are we really supposed to believe that labor as a class, despite all of its' defeats in the last 35 years is manipulating this inefficiency to its' advantage? To me it seems far more likely that it's the other way around and that employers are using this lack of knowledge to their advantage, like the silicon valley collusion that was discovered recently. I don't believe it's a bad thing...but I don't believe it's a solution either. The thing about appealing to market efficiency is that the free market is well-known to be absolute garbage at dealing with discrimination, and I'm not really sure I even necessarily agree that labor should strive to be an efficient free market in the first place (ideological reasons, mostly). Frankly, I'm more than a little bit stunned that the prevailing opinion seems to be "if we just make the markets free and efficient and unregulated enough, the invisible hand will solve discrimination for us" or "if it were just a little easier to sue, the threat of legal action would cause the invisible hand to end discrimination". I believe that far more drastic action is needed to genuinely combat pay discrimination. Public pay data would help some people, but at best it'd just narrow the pay gap, not erase it. I'm not against public pay data itself, I'm against treating it like a comprehensive solution when it's really just a weak half-measure.
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Apr 27, 2014 18:31
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Solkanar512 posted:So is it fair to call the firing of Jill Abramson an issue where transparency in pay would have significantly helped things, or is it too soon to tell? Pay transparency had nothing to do with it. She already knew about the pay disparity (with enough detail that she wasn't fooled even when they gave her a token raise that didn't actually close the gap), apparently confronted senior management about it on several different occasions, and even got a lawyer involved. The problem was that, even with the exact size of the pay disparity known to her and an obvious lawsuit brewing on the horizon, the NYT still decided they'd rather shitcan her than actually close the pay gap.
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May 16, 2014 20:42
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