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Strongest idea I'm aware of is radical pay transparency. If everyone's full pay and benefits were public knowledge, negotiation would be essentially algorithmic

Strongest idea I'm aware of is radical pay transparency. If everyone's full pay and benefits were public knowledge, negotiation would be essentially algorithmic. The information asymmetry currently benefits capital greatly, but if we can overcome the cultural blocks to pay transparency, I am confident almost everyone will be better off. It's late, so I won't find the sources for this, but there is ample evidence of the beneficial effects for labor negotiation. Consider the recent law where CEO bonuses would be public. After that, CEO pay actually went up because it was easier for them to negotiate.

freefrog334433 5y ago
Asking about someone's salary is normal in Cambodia, and in a Telecommunications company I worked, everyone knew each other's salary, which worked well. HR would send memos asking people not to discuss salary, as they couldn't play games. I used to tell people we were hiring to increase their asking salary, because I was tired of going to HR after their first week, when they realised they were being underpaid, and asking for raises for them.
tw04 5y ago
> Strongest idea I'm aware of is radical pay transparency. This falls apart immediately. Executive compensation is radically transparent at every publicly traded company and yet people are just ok with the Grand Canyon sized gap that has grown between average worker and executives over the last 40 years.
- derac 5y ago
  How does an individual worker leverage CEO pay transparency to negotiate higher pay?
- robcohen 5y ago
  What? How would executive pay transparency help workers? If worker pay is transparent for all positions, that would help negotiations. Merely making executive pay transparent does nothing to help anyone other than the executives.
- MadeThisToReply 5y ago
  I don't think people are okay with it - they just don't have the power to do anything about it.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  When a CEO wants a pay raise they go to the board and say “look at how much these other public company CEOs get paid. You should pay me more.” The equivalent for a worker is pointing at pay at competitors or of their peers (or you know, producing a job offer for more pay by which point their employer has ended up in a worse position because the employee has a much better BATNA). The alternative is not for the worker to say “look how much the CEO is paid, you should pay me more” because the response is that the CEO does different work and their pay is set by different people who care about different things—the pay is not really commensurate.
paisawalla 5y ago
Under the system you propose, there is zero chance that any mean worker will look at the pay of his higher-producing counterpart and not simultaneously claim to be underpaid and unfairly measured. You have to be completely unfamiliar with human nature to believe otherwise. There's two types of systems you can choose to live under: one that makes it comfortable to be a mean producer, or one that incentives extreme output. It's fine to argue that the mean producer deserves more but let's not pretend that's not a tradeoff. Extremely productive workers would not want pay transparency because that paints a target on their backs.
- robcohen 5y ago
  > There's two types of systems you can choose to live under Evidence? I would argue it's more likely that everyone benefits if pay transparency exists, especially the workers that provide the most benefit.
  - paisawalla 5y ago
    What would the incentive be for a mean, or even underperforming, worker to look at the pay of a top performer and do anything other than argue for more pay for the same amount of work? The value a worker brings is not a completely tangible assessment, it has vague and qualitative components to it. Whereas, how much that worker is paid is a hard quantitative fact and is not debatable. If you remove the ability of the manager to obfuscate where an employee's earnings stack up in the absolute rank, or how much additional pay is on the table, then the only thing to argue about is how much value the worker brings. The worker will always be able to claim that they deliver unmeasured value, or that their tangible contributions are not properly valued. Multiply this conversation out across 50% of your work force, and quickly the only rational thing to do, as a manager, is to bring down the top earner's pay to a level that will not generate complaints from the mean worker. This is the aim of all collectivism frankly, to appease the mean producer at the expense of society ultimately. If you don't believe this, explain please the chain of reasoning that would lead a lower paid worker to conclude their pay is fair and that they should not try to argue for more money.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
"Consider the recent law where CEO bonuses would be public. After that, CEO pay actually went up because it was easier for them to negotiate." That's an important point in any negotiation: Knowledge is power. Without knowledge you are probably the loser even if you think otherwise.
sershe 5y ago
That assumes everyone has a realistic view of their contribution. I've definitely worked with "10x" engineers, and also "0.1x" engineers, and a good share of the latter would be really offended if the pay was fair and they found out they are massively "underpaid". Some 0.1x engineers I worked with were literally playing fantasy baseball at work, those would be fine, but many (including confirmed ones whose messes I cleaned up) had outsized view of their contribution, and they would be very unhappy under pay transparency. Whereas I think the "10x" engineers would not be much happier knowing they are "overpaid" compared to most. So, this system benefits no one... it only works if workers are mostly interchangeable.

freefrog334433 5y ago

Asking about someone's salary is normal in Cambodia, and in a Telecommunications company I worked, everyone knew each other's salary, which worked well. HR would send memos asking people not to discuss salary, as they couldn't play games. I used to tell people we were hiring to increase their asking salary, because I was tired of going to HR after their first week, when they realised they were being underpaid, and asking for raises for them.

tw04 5y ago

> Strongest idea I'm aware of is radical pay transparency. This falls apart immediately. Executive compensation is radically transparent at every publicly traded company and yet people are just ok with the Grand Canyon sized gap that has grown between average worker and executives over the last 40 years.

derac 5y ago
How does an individual worker leverage CEO pay transparency to negotiate higher pay?
robcohen 5y ago
What? How would executive pay transparency help workers? If worker pay is transparent for all positions, that would help negotiations. Merely making executive pay transparent does nothing to help anyone other than the executives.
MadeThisToReply 5y ago
I don't think people are okay with it - they just don't have the power to do anything about it.
dan-robertson 5y ago
When a CEO wants a pay raise they go to the board and say “look at how much these other public company CEOs get paid. You should pay me more.” The equivalent for a worker is pointing at pay at competitors or of their peers (or you know, producing a job offer for more pay by which point their employer has ended up in a worse position because the employee has a much better BATNA). The alternative is not for the worker to say “look how much the CEO is paid, you should pay me more” because the response is that the CEO does different work and their pay is set by different people who care about different things—the pay is not really commensurate.

paisawalla 5y ago

Under the system you propose, there is zero chance that any mean worker will look at the pay of his higher-producing counterpart and not simultaneously claim to be underpaid and unfairly measured. You have to be completely unfamiliar with human nature to believe otherwise. There's two types of systems you can choose to live under: one that makes it comfortable to be a mean producer, or one that incentives extreme output. It's fine to argue that the mean producer deserves more but let's not pretend that's not a tradeoff. Extremely productive workers would not want pay transparency because that paints a target on their backs.

robcohen 5y ago
> There's two types of systems you can choose to live under Evidence? I would argue it's more likely that everyone benefits if pay transparency exists, especially the workers that provide the most benefit.
- paisawalla 5y ago
  What would the incentive be for a mean, or even underperforming, worker to look at the pay of a top performer and do anything other than argue for more pay for the same amount of work? The value a worker brings is not a completely tangible assessment, it has vague and qualitative components to it. Whereas, how much that worker is paid is a hard quantitative fact and is not debatable. If you remove the ability of the manager to obfuscate where an employee's earnings stack up in the absolute rank, or how much additional pay is on the table, then the only thing to argue about is how much value the worker brings. The worker will always be able to claim that they deliver unmeasured value, or that their tangible contributions are not properly valued. Multiply this conversation out across 50% of your work force, and quickly the only rational thing to do, as a manager, is to bring down the top earner's pay to a level that will not generate complaints from the mean worker. This is the aim of all collectivism frankly, to appease the mean producer at the expense of society ultimately. If you don't believe this, explain please the chain of reasoning that would lead a lower paid worker to conclude their pay is fair and that they should not try to argue for more money.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

"Consider the recent law where CEO bonuses would be public. After that, CEO pay actually went up because it was easier for them to negotiate." That's an important point in any negotiation: Knowledge is power. Without knowledge you are probably the loser even if you think otherwise.

sershe 5y ago

That assumes everyone has a realistic view of their contribution. I've definitely worked with "10x" engineers, and also "0.1x" engineers, and a good share of the latter would be really offended if the pay was fair and they found out they are massively "underpaid". Some 0.1x engineers I worked with were literally playing fantasy baseball at work, those would be fine, but many (including confirmed ones whose messes I cleaned up) had outsized view of their contribution, and they would be very unhappy under pay transparency. Whereas I think the "10x" engineers would not be much happier knowing they are "overpaid" compared to most. So, this system benefits no one... it only works if workers are mostly interchangeable.