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What If Companies Were Required to Tell Workers What Their Colleagues Earn?
- sharemywin 9y agoWhat if companies were required to tell customers what other firms paid?
- eesmith 9y agoAnd what if the moon were made of green cheese? Thing is, other countries do have public salary information and have somehow resisted the urge to mandate that all company books be public. As this HBR article points out, there is an information asymmetry. "Employers, on the other hand, often have ready access to fulsome data on compensation." while "a recent survey revealed that 41% of workers are discouraged from talking about pay and a shocking 25% of workers fear retribution over pay discussions." (It is, by the way, illegal for a company to punish someone for making their salary information public, under the National Labor Relations Act. There is no reason your HR department is going to train you in anything more than the bare minimum of what your legal rights are.) While company-to-company interactions are on a more equal footing, so there is less of a reason for government oversight or intervention. As for company-to-customer relations, well, sometimes there is a requirement, like when taxis have signs posted saying what the standard rates are supposed to be. This is a case where there can be a very high asymmetry. In any case, publishing one's own employee rates requires trivial effort. In fact, the government knows those numbers so there's no reason the IRS couldn't just publish them. While what you mention requires extra work to determine who the other companies are, with similar products, and their prices.