U.S. Pay Reform

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > U.S. Pay Reform

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

With the Paycheck Fairness Act being blocked for the umpteenth time last week, I wonder if this niche issue is really hiding a bigger issue.

Studies have indisputably shown that women aren't making as much as men for the same jobs, at least as much as we can statistically adjust the numbers to determine "same jobs". I want Equal Pay for Women as much as the next person, but it seems idiotic to try and pass a law to prohibit a pervasive and subtle cultural ideology that can easily be dodged.

The "teeth" of the latest attempt were to prohibit retaliation for employees discussing wages with each other. It's a noble goal, but retaliation is one of the least enforceable labor rights - any employer with a quarter of a brain is going to trump up a legal cause for firing an employee that they want to retaliate against. And even if an employee is litigious enough to take an employer to court, the remedies are pretty poor.

The hidden issue I mentioned earlier isn't gender discrimination, but wage discrimination of all types. Sometimes peers are paid vastly different salaries, for no reason other than that some have the gumption to ask for more money, or are better at negotiating a higher salary for the same work at hiring time. People are discriminated against based on race, age, attractiveness, and dozens of other factors every day.

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.

I'm sure big business would fight tooth and nail to stop this, but what arguments are there to keep these things secret?

# ¿ Apr 15, 2014 18:46

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 22, 2024 17:19

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

ColoradoCleric posted:

How is this necessarily discrimination then?

Because your skill at reading someone's poker face and knowing when you've made the best possible deal, based on hidden information, shouldn't be a requirement for getting good pay?

McDowell posted:

There should be a transparent, national paygrade system. This simplifies the tax code and addresses income inequality in one go.

Are you serious? I'm as left-wing socialist as they come and this sounds impossibly oversimplified.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2014 19:01

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

wateroverfire posted:

It'd be interesting for sure.

Off the top of my head, just throwing that information out there would cause a lot of angst and much of it would be inappropriate bitching about pay differences that are actually justified. It could also be a double-edged sword. If a prospective employer could look at your record and see what you're making / have made it would be more difficult to change jobs and trade up to a higher salary.

This might actually be an unintended point on the plus-side for business.

One of the biggest complaints that businesses have about on-the-job training is that people who get hired and trained promptly leave for greener pastures, so nobody is willing to front the costs to train employees and will only hire overqualified people. Especially for younger employees, changing jobs yearly isn't uncommon, and is by far a bigger source of salary growth than pay raises. Lowering churn would probably be a good thing, especially if pay raises increased as new hires stopped getting hired for more than the existing employees.

ColoradoCleric posted:

I think wage negotiations are more than just reading a poker face and actually include things like trying to justify to your employer why you deserve more income.

It's been my experience that this is more gamesmanship than fact-based justification. You can't know if you deserve more income unless you know what income similar people are paid for similar work.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2014 19:15

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

ColoradoCleric posted:

But now you're making the argument that you deserve the same income as other workers when its the employer's decision on how much you should be paid.

I'm making the argument that employers do decide how much you get paid, even if they are unfair pricks who can't justify why they are paying people what they pay them. But employees should know if their employers are unfair pricks, and be able to find employment that is under terms that both parties agree is fair. Eventually the unfair pricks won't be able to find employees unless they start treating people better. If you're in favor of market solutions, then lovely employers should lose just like lovely employees do, without a shield of secrecy to protect them from the consequences of their choices.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2014 19:33

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

ColoradoCleric posted:

It's also in the interest of your voting members but they probably value the CEO more highly than an accountant in terms of driving the company.

Can you explain why this matters in the context of this thread? Is there a rational basis for salaries to be secret, or is your argument just restating that right now they are secret, and that executives and shareholders like it that way?

# ¿ Apr 15, 2014 20:03

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

wateroverfire posted:

That's a weird framing. Employees already find employment under terms they agree are fair, and employers can justify why they are paying people what they pay them. Making all salary information public would make available the differences without making available the justifications. It seems like mostly what that will lead to is a bunch of bitching that JENNY HAS BEEN HERE 2 MONTHS LESS THAN ME BUT SHE MAKES 2K MORE when it's possible Jenny has more important projects, or came from another job making more, is better at her job and more useful, or maybe she negotiated better, etc. No matter what, those justifications will be seen as bullshit by the slighted party and the *rabble rabble* will continue. From an employer's POV that is not in any way worth dealing with and so they keep the info private and try to cut those discussions off when they happen.

If Jenny is more senior, or has a more demanding set of projects, then it's a good justification for paying her more. A 2K difference between employees makes sense when subjective measures are taken into account. But if Jenny was making twice as much as you, you'd be right to get pissed off when you found out, no? Right now it's a discussion that doesn't happen at all, and I can't think of a better way to get fairer pay than making it transparent that nobody is getting a sweetheart deal.

It's obvious why employers keep the info secret presently. What I don't think is obvious, is what the repercussions would be to make it public.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2014 20:58

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

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.

The effective difference is trying to account for the business culture around wages. Even if discussing them was better protected, lots of people are reluctant to talk about it for personal reasons. And not everybody has the kind of work environment where talking about personal issues with your coworkers is the norm. If you were a woman being discriminated against, it doesn't help you if you tell your male coworkers your salary and they say "huh, that sounds good to me" and don't want to volunteer their (higher) salaries... you're not making any headway.

And the ease of enforcement issue is a real one. I (anecdotally) know of a lot of people who were disciplined or fired for retaliatory reasons, but never pursued it. Filing a lawsuit is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, and it's very hard to prove that you were discriminated against when there's inherently very little evidence that can be presented about the mental state of your boss.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2014 16:05

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

wateroverfire posted:

The proposal is that everyone's salary data be made public, I think?

Well, the original proposal I made wasn't set in stone. Maybe it's public, maybe it's privileged information only available to employees at a particular company.

I'd lean towards it only being available to internal employees. There are privacy implications either way, but there are much worse ones if everyone with a job had his pay publicly available.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2014 19:40

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

Main Paineframe posted:

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.

Wage transparency (a relatively non-radical change) isn't going to single-handedly eliminate centuries of systematic discrimination overnight. Nothing will remove those prejudices overnight, but making it harder to harbor unspoken prejudices is how you make them go away.

Giving everyone a peek at the payroll system tomorrow isn't going to correct bad practices on their own. But when employers need to justify to their workers who are making less than their peers, why they are making less, employers are going to be a lot more accountable for it. Whether they don't want to be pestered, or they want to retain their valuable talent, or they just want to avoid lawsuits, employers aren't going to be able to stonewall their employees for long. Just because you haven't gathered legal proof of discrimination doesn't mean you (as an employee who is being slighted) can't effect a change in your own situation without getting the law involved.

Obdicut posted:

Really, saying 'this ignores reality' isn't a very good substitute for an argument.

Professional networking often propagates exclusion of people from lower classes and the non-dominant race. Even though the reality is that a lot of people get jobs through their networks, it doesn't follow that this is therefore fine. There is a big difference between being vouched for as "Yes, I know him, he did a wonderful job and he'll be a great employee," and "Yes, I know him, we were in the same frat, he's our kind of people." The latter is, indeed, bad, and is also common. The previous isn't in and of itself bad, but it can be in that it excludes people who didn't get the chances to prove themselves in the first place. For example, getting internships (the real ones, not the 'make 'em do the photocopying' type) can be a significant foot in the door, can help with grad school applications, etc., precisely because someone can then legitimately vouch for you. But if the way that the internships are awarded is itself tainted by the second kind of 'networking', then a lot of people never got the chance to prove themselves.

The two types of networking are highly intertwined and hard to tease out, precisely because of this.

If this networking is so destructive, what would you replace it with? There isn't a magic spell that employers can use to find suitable employees for job openings, just like there isn't a magic spell that employees can use to find open jobs. Job sites like Monster.com are bullshit, newspapers are dying, is there a solution besides "hire the first warm body who really wants a chance?"

Nepotism (where someone unqualified gets a job because of connections) isn't even remotely the same thing as a qualified person getting a foot in the door because he's previously proved himself somewhere along the line to someone who can vouch for him.

Infinite Karma fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Apr 19, 2014

# ¿ Apr 19, 2014 20:12

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 22, 2024 17:19

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

The only reason it might not help her is that (from those sources, at least), her and her predecessors total compensation was very opaque. Between bonuses and stock options/dividends, and up-front sums versus vested ones, it's comparing apples to oranges. Maybe it cost the NYT less money to retain her, maybe it didn't. It definitely looks like they got caught repeatedly with their hands in the cookie jar, though.

# ¿ May 16, 2014 21:13

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > U.S. Pay Reform