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> Our model predicts that transparency reduces the individual bargaining power of workers, leading to lower average wages. But, are those of us advocating for
by saurik 5y ago
> Our model predicts that transparency reduces the individual bargaining power of workers, leading to lower average wages.
But, are those of us advocating for pay transparency trying to increase the average wage, though, or trying to reduce pay disparity?
- sokoloff 5y agoWhy ask others to guess what your motivations are if you can instead tell us? Reducing disparity within a company is surely achievable and almost inevitable. I don’t personally believe it’s desirable in endeavors where value contributions can be heavily unevenly distributed, because it likely leads to the company being unable to employ the very top value contributors as another company can [and likely will choose to] pay them more, which is consistent with the main claims in the article.
- lsiebert 5y agoyeah, as best I can tell you absolutely can pay someone more if they are better at their job under equal pay laws. In California for example, the equal pay act requires 'equal pay for employees who perform “substantially similar work,” when viewed as a composite of skill, effort, and responsibility.' https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/California_Equal_Pay_Act.htm https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/California_Equal_Pay_Act.htm Someone who contributes more inherently must have greater skills and/or put in greater effort, and likely greater responsibility, given they are accomplishing more tasks. You can pay differently based on a seniority system, a merit system, a system that measures earnings by quantity or quality of production, or another bonafide factor such as education, training or experience. Here's a copy of that law, it's pretty short. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB§ionNum=1197.5 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
- sokoloff 5y agoMA law is fairly similar. My concerns around transparency are mostly individual privacy concerns rather than believing that employees (or even regulators) can’t understand generally why two people could justly be paid different quantities of the local currency. No place is (yet) mandating perfect sameness of the latter and I don’t expect that to be policy in my lifetime or while we have the concept of money as a society.
- lsiebert 5y agoAFAIK pay transparency doesn't require them to say who gets paid what specifically. In a large company, how would you even know?
- saurik 5y ago> Why ask others to guess what your motivations are if you can instead tell us? Because directly stating "the authors of this paper misunderstood the purpose of pay transparency: it doesn't matter what the average pay becomes, as the goal was to reduce pay disparity" is a more forceful statement that makes more assumptions and simply isn't as friendly as asking it in the form of a question (which might be taken as a socratic dialog, but that also feels more friendly to me than a lecture).
- sokoloff 5y agoWhen you make and state assumptions about what others want, that's [frequently] bad. When you make statements about what you want, that's good for discourse.
- slumdev 5y agoIn other words: Is it worth decreasing disparity if the only way to achieve it is to make us all poorer?
- saurik 5y agoHow does decreasing the average imply we are "all" poorer? Literally 99% of everyone could be making more money, but if one person who was only making more money because it could be done in secret is now making considerably less, then the average would still go down. I don't know anyone who actually cared about "average wage"...
- slumdev 5y agoA higher average, even if I'm not participating in it, will benefit me. Looking at a list of countries sorted by GDP per capita reveals that the ones nearest the top (with the highest average) are, with few exceptions, the best places to live even if one is earning less than that average: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PP...
- aeternum 5y agoI wonder how they would explain CEO pay transparency resulting in significant pay bumps. Individual bargaining may decrease within the company, but will make it easier for other companies to poach underpaid employees.