Radical Solution Time

[andrewducker]

So, I was reading the recent news saying that the Gender Pay Gap in the UK is still bloody ridiculous, containing yet another example of a woman who worked somehere for years before discovering she was being paid 2/3 as much as the two men doing exactly the same job she was.

And I thought of the simple, obvious answer.

Everyone's pay should be a matter of public knowledge.

You want to know if the useless bastard in the corner is paid more than the genius savant sitting next to him?  Fine.

Want to know if you're being paid as much as someone in exactly the same job in a different company.  No problem.

Want to know if your manager is paying the blondes in the office more than the brunettes?  Knock up your own spreadsheet.

Fuck it - everyone will be embarassed about their own pay for about 3 days - and after that it should knock some sense into management who think they can treat some people like shit because they never ask for a raise, or get away with inequitable treatment because nobody ever talks about it  If they can't justify the pay they give, openly and transparently, then they shouldn't be bloody well paying it.

Oh, and £26,000, in case you were wondering.

Comments

[robhu.livejournal.com]

At some companies telling someone else your pay is an automatic sackable offense.

I don't think there is an official policy at my work place, but four years ago it was like 'and don't tell them what we pay you because if they knew...' which I think is utter bullshit.

[andrewducker]

Yup - it's so clearly management's way of keeping people on lower pay than they should be on.

[haloumi.livejournal.com]

Look, I'm not going to tell you again.

Stop undermining the inherently divisive deceptions that are practised by the empowered elite to make us believe that capitalism is somehow a good thing for us by exploiting our selfish aspects!

I can't make it any clearer!

(And.. I have no idea what my gross pay is because I get a large chunk without tax - PhD stipend. Sorry about that.)

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

Hmm, thought you'd be on more.

[andrewducker]

I took a step down from IT manager at a small company (80-odd people) to graduate trainee, in order to get into a large financial company as a developer. Meant a pay cut, but it was worth it for the satisfaction levels.

I hope to be promoted in a year or two, of course. But i've only been here three years, and I've been promoted once.

[gomichan.livejournal.com]

When I last worked for pay (as opposed to the mixed nuts and confetti that cartoonists earn), I was told up front that my starting wage was not the same as every other starting wage: "Higher than some, lower than others. It reflects how much responsibility we think we can place on you." Their policy was that you're not forbidden to tell your pay, but you're not obligated to either, and it's rude to bring it up. Which is, I suppose, sensible in a society of feeling types.

I would've been just fine with hearing that the 17-year-old student who started at the same time got a lower starting wage, and the grandma who'd worked in a similar shop before got a higher one. Makes perfect sense to me. But then, I'm one of those tricksy thinking-types.

Mostly, though, I just wanted to tell you your icon made me laugh my ass off.

[andrewducker]

Paying based on experience is fine by me - and you can justify it to people. Paying base just on age seems mucy less so though.

Glad you liked the icon.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Yes. Every few months I get pissed off about this as well.

(£25k.)

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

Well said mate. Well said.

As a student I earn bugger all, otherwise I'd be happy to tell you.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I earn nothing. Bex earns... well, significantly less than you, anyway. You know what this means: You aren't buying me enough drinks.

[i-ate-my-crusts.livejournal.com]

Mine's in Australian dollars, so sounds far more impressive than yours, until you figure out the conversion rate.

($64k)

[andrewducker]

At which point it becomes pretty much the same as mine.

Does the same thing happen with kangaroos? Are they really the same size as cats?

[slammerkinbabe.livejournal.com]

What a fantastic solution.

$31,000! I think. I don't know, I get $450 a week after taxes.

[oldbaldchris.livejournal.com]

I agree completely ; I have the additional problem that in Germany it is considered perfectly normal for an older person who is doing the same job as someone else to get paid more simply because of their age. This has led to the ridiculous (in my opinion) situation that while I do the same job as two other people , one gets paid more because he is five years older than me , the other substantially less while he is ten years younger. Especially stupid considering that if I am completely honest the younger guy is the best out of the three of us.

[andrewducker]

I can certainly see why that would be annoying - I don't have a problem with paying for experience, but paying someone more just for being old seems odd.

Does Germany still have those odd rules about only being able to hire upper management on certain days of the year?

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

Isn't some aspects of the company's payroll already covered under The Freedom of Information Act?

(And poverty-stricken student/£4 per hr/£20 per hr/Contract depending on who's asking...I get by)

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

FOI only applies against public bodies.

[wordofblake.livejournal.com]

I do the same job in my section as 5 other people who are all paid more than my £13,981, plus they get 5 days more leave per year than I do.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I left a job (the best job I ever had, in terms of work) because I know damned well that they had started 2 new people, to do an exactly identical job to mine, neither of whom was any better than me, on substantially more money than I was on. I also knew the market rate, and despite my recent (substantial) rise, I was still well below it. I put this to them, they refused to do anything, so I left. Leaving them to have to hire someone in at the market rate... I still don't understand that.

£40k - not really changed for the past 6 years, actually... as I have slowly downgraded my stress levels.

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

I know that in our office, there's an enormous range of pay for doing the same job, because basically it used to be a more skilled job (20 years ago, when subtitling and computers were both new and exciting ideas) and a higher grade, I think, than it is now. They've changed the way pay scales work and stuff - you used to get a much bigger annual increase, I think. And they distinctly discourage people talking about their salary, or especially whether they got bonuses.

(£25,000, and that's in the top band for the job I do. Other people get up to about £35,000, I think, for exactly the same job. Nowt to do with gender, though, just how long you've been here.)

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Open dislosure is a fairly radical solution indeed, and isn't going to work very well because of all the reasons cited above.

I'm convinced that the closest thing that we'll get to a working solution in the near future is to increase accountability. The root of the trouble is that there is no objective process for determining how much people get paid for their job, and it frequently comes down to the 'judgement' of management, and that judgement is subjective and can be influenced by factors such as blonde vs. brunette.

My solution would be to require employers to publish their salary model, in such a fashion that any external reviewer would be able to audit an employee's pay with reference only to the published model and the employee's pay, and some existing objective measures of productivity.

A reviewable salary model is already damn close to begin an executable model, so combining this with the payroll information already available to agencies such as the inland revenue, it means the task of spotting discriminatory pay can be largely automated and where necessary audited.

Accountability, that's the name of the game.

But..

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

What;s an "objective measure of productivity"? Ok in sales, less so in IT, hopeless in medicine I'd have thought (no of patients still alive? no of patients cured?) - god knows what counts in academe - RAE, teaching hours, actually being any use at what you do?
I suppose requiring performance related pay - and things are going that way,even in academe - is sort of the same thing so long as performance objectives are auditable? (but see above..)
After much thought I tend to agree on the full disclosure model. The current system is a restrictive practice, basically.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. The Equal Opportunities Commission did a campaign a while back encouraging everyone to tell and to ask, and it's a bloody powerful thing to know.

Before I quit work I was getting £24,000 pro rata (half time), and now I get £15 an hour for 7 hours a week.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the government give me £17 a week for a 24-hour-a-day job raising a future taxpayer to keep the rest of you in your old age :)

[draconid.livejournal.com]

That's the nice thing about working for a company with a set grading structure. You just need to know someone's job title to know what they're earning.

The edges will be blurred a bit once we move within WAG as they do pay on experience as well as "grade", but it should still be roughly evident what someone will earn.

I know someone who worked somewhere where there were two or three typists all on different wages, all doing identical jobs. They had been told not to tell each other what they earned. But the person I knew was a temp so was able to find out and tell the others. She was horrified at the low and widely varying wages of these women.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

I'm earning less than the minimum wage.

I'm earning less than last year's minimum wage.

I'm not surprised. I work in a shop. Shops generally ignore legalities.

I might complain, but I sort of need the job and there aren't many going around.

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

I agree with you and I hateknow I'm doing much worse than the graduates who started the year before me as a result: by more than £5000 as it happens. Unfortunately someone* overheard me speaking to one of those graduates about the changes are I spent an hour being bellowed at and told to 'look at the bigger picture' and 'not discuss salary'. Given this conversation took place down the pub (albeit while away on business) I was not at all amused.

Then again, we're also not supposed to tell anyone our level, even though it goes up when a job's advertised, so you can pretty much figure it out...

* I know exactly who this person is.

[miramon.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm a management consultant (as you may be aware). This isn't my area, but as I understand it the main reason for the policy is to stop the sort of discussion you're having here. If you have an open policy on pay, what happens is countless, endless arguments along the lines of:

"He's earning more than me"

"But you're on better terms and conditions/have less seniority/get an annual bonus/earn commission/are in the pension scheme/have a season ticket allowance/are a complete pain in the backside"

"But I'd rather have the salary"

"We can't change this without it being unfair to somebody else/getting everybody upset/breaking the agreement with the union/creating a tax problem/messing up the balance sheet"

"Well, I'm going to raise a big stink about this!"

Basically, the policy that keeps dissent to a minimum (and allows HR to spend their days with their feet up) is for everyone's pay to be secret. If nobody knows, you just get a low background level of grumbling instead of out and out warfare. An open policy would probably entail hiring several additional HR people just to sort out the problems (meaning there's less money to go round), there would be more people leaving or threatening to leave, and a significantly higher risk of industrial action. In the long run, from a senior management point of view, this one's a no brainer; the general level of happiness is improved by pay not being open.

[notosa.livejournal.com]

I also think an open policy would change the employment market world wide... employment conditions would become harsher as employees would have to justify their worth to the second, you would get punished for having a cigarette break, all the unspoken but uneven benifits would be cut into your family time, and personal enjoyment. As a manager I see the business benefits from measuring such... however the loss of moral.. of productivity, the people component would be devestation.

[code-delphi.livejournal.com]

My company has it written into our terms of employment that we're not to reveal our salary to anyone! You are absolutely right: make all salaries visible to all, not matter who you are. Keeping it secret benefits no one except the company, whose strategy is to pay as little as possible for its workforce. If Joe is willing to work for X, while Fred who does an equivalent job demands X*2, then as long as Joe remains in the dark then all is well as far as management is concerned!

Personally, actual volume of pay matters less than knowing I'm being paid fairly *relative* to everyone else. Making all salaries (especially managers) transparent ensures that inequities are at least visible, and certainly would create the necessary pressure to ensure that discrepencies were fixed.

£26,000 doesn't seem like much, though (as you say in a reply to a comment) I realise that that's the result of deliberately taking a lower-paid position. I admire you for accepting greater job satisfaction over a high salary!

[andrewducker]

I'm being painted as slightly more of a martyr than I am. It was also because my skills were in a slightly esoteric area (Visual Foxpro) and I realised that moving to a larger company would have positive effects in the long run, as I'd get more training and improve my marketable skills. As it is, I'm actually pretty happy where I am, and in no rush to move on, but if I was then a year of C# work in an enterprise environment hasn't done me any harm, and neither has two years working with COBOL in a Z/OS environment.

[notosa.livejournal.com]

I work in management and only just found out exactly what my 12 staff below me are earning, i was dismayed to find that there were differences ( not too substantial but still differences,) and some of the people being paid more were far from the best of my staff... I wanted to rectify it, but my manager said straight out. NO. We are not allowed to talk about it, its a severely diciplinary thing, just like bonuses, i found out that as a 'retention' thing one of my staff under me got the same bonus as I did. I wasnt impressed, but from a mananagemnet point I understand how important it is not to have individuals pay public knowlegde. how many people think they deserve more when they dont, and vice versa I guess as well.. employee performance is not exactly measurable.. Sure you do 100 deals a day, but how much crap do other people have to clean up your mistaks on after. Is that person the same performer and worth more then someone who does 70 deals and gets them all right

[andrewducker]

So you're saying that because management aren't willing or able to explain to people that they don't deserve the same pay, people shouldn't be allowed to know that they are?

Sounds like the equivalent of security through obscurity. If you can't explain it to them, then the explanation probably doesn't hold water. If you're letting people get away with producing a lot of crap, without telling them that it's causing them to get paid less, then you're probably not doing a good job as a manager...