I worked in a state govt office in Virginia some years ago and the local paper did a FOIA request for everyone's salaries in the state...and published an online database of the upper 50%. <a href="http://data.richmond.com/salaries/" rel="nofollow">http://data.richmond.com/salaries/</a><p>My coworkers, by-and-large, were furious. I found it really helpful. I found out where I was relative to my peers (I was only behind by a few hundred bucks/year - we were all basically equal if we had the same title, except for one guy that had abused the state 10% raise when switching departments). One guy in our DBA/Ops team discovered he was getting a relatively paltry amount while his peers were all getting 6 digits (which was all on the bosses - his peers were also bothered by this). One or two people had very questionably high salaries and were suddenly held by others to be delivering at that level. Mostly, though, it calmed people down about salary differences.<p>Honestly, it was awkward for some people, but honestly I think the benefits outweighed the costs, at least within the office. Much of my coworkers' outrage was about people OUTSIDE the office finding their salaries, such as friends, family, neighbors, people wanting money, etc.
<a href="https://www.Levels.fyi" rel="nofollow">https://www.Levels.fyi</a> started very similar to the 'Ask a Manager' survey in the article. We had a Google Form / Spreadsheet to collect salaries in tech. In fact, they still underpin our UI today. We've had folks mention that our data is more accurate than Glassdoor, etc. We're working on several features to ensure our data continues to remain accurate, fresh and easy to analyze. Ping me at my email in profile if you have feedback!
In Nordic countries, everyone's tax return bottom line is public information. You can look up your neighbour or co-worker or the average celebrity if you want to know how much income and capital gains they reported. Societies haven't yet collapsed from unbridled jealousy.<p>Meanwhile in America the topic is taboo. Apparently you can get five years of jail for leaking someone's tax information — in the same country where personal information privacy barely exists otherwise. Strange.
There's already a huge database of your coworkers' salaries, assuming you work with any H-1B visa holders (<a href="https://h1bsalary.online" rel="nofollow">https://h1bsalary.online</a>). I seem to recall the government had a portal you can search by name too.
There are lots of comments to this effect in the NYTimes article, but large swaths of the population already have their salary data public: many (most?) public sector workers' salary is public knowledge, oftentimes searchable on a website, military pay grades are public, highly paid executives report most of their compensation in SEC docs, etc.<p>Thus, I don't really buy the myriad of reasons presented here for why this is such a bad idea.
> There is no law that stops employees from sharing salary information, but myths persist at many workplaces that sharing is forbidden<p>This is failing to address the scenario where not sharing salary is company policy and/or part of the employment agreement or contract. If my personal experience is any indicator, I would speculate that this is quite common at large companies.<p>And, I don't know, having other people share their salary information is good for me, but sharing mine can certainly be used against me in a variety of subtle ways. People are consciously and unconsciously judgemental by nature. Sometimes I have a relatively good deal and I know it, so sometimes I don't want to share salary because I know it would only make other people feel bad. Sometimes I don't want to know that someone makes more than me because it would make me feel bad, when ultimately it doesn't matter.<p>I am genuinely interested in the idea of sharing, but I really want some stronger reasons of why it's to my actual personal benefit today to share that information, assuming my employment agreement allows it. I didn't see any in this article.
Within the office...most people know/can guess each other's fairly accurately.<p>I stopped talking to family about it though. Different countries and CoL means my raises end up being more than their total package. So discussing that leads to nothing wholesome. Instead I try to silently absorb more of the family costs than proportionate.
The government of Ontario releases the salaries of all public employees every year if they make over 100k. So called sunshine list <a href="https://www.ontario.ca/page/public-sector-salary-disclosure" rel="nofollow">https://www.ontario.ca/page/public-sector-salary-disclosure</a>
It's not as easy a question as it sounds. Sharing this information within a company usually means trouble. So it doesn't look like a good idea to share it with society at large. At the same time, honesty and transparency is the best policy... Privacy, security, and psychological issues are at stake when it comes to money.<p>> the gig economy has made salary comparing a near necessity for many.<p>Obviously, most freelancers would love if this information was public.
If rates are public, you know where you are standing and where to start if you want to provide a service. That is not exactly the same as telling how much money one makes—one can only infer so much. Despite this, most freelancers are still secretive about their rate—as if this was always an advantage.
It seems to me like there's a potentially privacy sensitive way to share the information. For any role with more than N employees, the mean and standard deviation are published: simple, equitable, and private.
Knowing other people's salaries gives you a stronger negotiating position. Other people knowing your salary gives you a weaker negotiating position.<p>Should you tell the world how much money you make? Are you altruistic?