The title seems to be speaking to me(the workers). I'm particularly curious about the 'cons' part. After all, what harm can it do if I know my colleagues' wages

The title seems to be speaking to me(the workers). I'm particularly curious about the 'cons' part. After all, what harm can it do if I know my colleagues' wages or if my colleagues know mine but: > Transparency appears to hand employers a powerful bargaining tool: firms can argue that a pay rise for one individual would need to be replicated for others. > A lower wage bill is not necessarily good news for firms, however. Productivity at affected Danish firms also went down, perhaps because lower earners were fed up to discover they were undervalued or because higher earners resented the slower wage growth that followed. > Transparency can also stoke motivation. A recent paper by Cédric Gutierrez of Bocconi University and his co-authors found that pay transparency among American academics increased the effort of those who were revealed to be overpaid. If you’re earning a lot more than others, you’d better prove your worth. Uh, oh, it's The Economist, it's not for me