8 ms·

> If your employees feel Jeff is making too much money, maybe he is? Or maybe your company is doing a poor job of making it clear what it is that he brings to t

• eyko 11y ago
  Then don't pay someone 50K and someone 250K when their value is fairly similar. I think it's common sense that if there's a certain sense of equality among your workers, nobody is going to be bothered because Jeff in sales earns 15K/year more than them, if in general there's not such a big margin between Jeff and Jane. I also believe making salaries public are also a good way to fight against gender-inequality in the work place and it makes workers think collectively rather than individually.
  • DanBC 11y ago
    The UK supermarket ASDA is going through a sex discrimination legal case at the moment. Warehouse employees get paid a bit more than shopfloor employees. Warehouse employees are mostly men. Shop floor employees are mostly women. The jobs are not identical, but they are similar. Shop floor employees include the shelf stackers - they take pallets of boxes of goods and unload these onto shelves. That's very similar to the lifting work that warehouse employees do. (There might be a need for some warehouse workers to have forklift licences, which would explain a small amount of the pay differential). In this legal case the wages of both group are pretty close to minimum wage. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/24/asda-mass-legal-action-equal-pay http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/24/asda-mass-le... http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/09/sainsburys-faces-equal-pay-battle-with-female-shop-floor-workers http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/09/sainsburys-f...
    • ensignavenger 11y ago
      I've never worked in the supermarket industry, but I have worked in warehouses and on retail floors- and in my experience, the pace and magnitude of the physical labor is significantly higher in the warehouse. Again, I can't generalize my experience to every company. One way they might address the allegations would be to transfer some warehouse employees to the sales floor and vice versa, providing a better mix, and a good opportunity for employees to see a different side of the operation. Of course, locations may not allow this easily- and may actually play into the pay disparity.
  • hueving 11y ago
    I take it you've never worked in or around sales with a commission? One big deal can easily quadruple a salesperson's salary for the quarter. When that happens, people will downplay the deal as just being luck and get upset that the salesperson is making so much. However, they don't bat an eye when the salesperson doesn't make their quota a couple quarters in a row and gets fired. People get jealous and can't handle the truth because a huge chunk of people don't even understand how a business works. Especially from an engineering side, it's really hard to swallow the fact that you have all of the skills and actually created the product, yet you will make 10% of what good salespeople make.
    • tomjen3 11y ago
      That is because sales people are overrated because you can measure what they bring to the table. Programmers, not so much.
    • ghaff 11y ago
      Pretty much. The same people who see salespeople as overpaid schmoozers and order-takers (some are, many aren't) would be utterly horrified at the thought they themselves could be fired without a second thought because of an organizational change or budget cut at a key account.
      • fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
        This happens to engineers often enough.
        • ghaff 11y ago
          Well, yes, projects get canceled and people get fired as a result. But there tends to be less of a direct linkage with this quarter's revenue than in the case of sales.
  • zaphar 11y ago
    Value is a subjective thing. What a company values is not necessarily the same thing as what an employee values. So that 250K salary may be due to something the company values at 250k for whatever reason the company has. This does not of course mean that the coworkers of that 250k salary think the work is worth 250k. That disconnect which can be difficult to fix will often cause bad feelings and poison the atmosphere. The correct solution of course is for the company to effectively communicate what is sees as valuable so that employees can work toward creating that value and measure correctly. This is harder than it sounds though.
    • wyclif 11y ago
      This is an excellent observation and a corrective to the often-seen and simplistic "x employee is more valuable than y employee." The merits a company places on a project or the valorization of said project is also in play. What's hard: even when Project A is effectively communicated as the most important thing BigCo does, Project B is still essential to BigCo's functioning and BigCo cannot exist without it, so how to counteract Project B employees feeling either devalued or jealous of Project A?
  • gorgak 11y ago
    i agree. the capitalist system is broken (or more has failed already) and the inequality now is getting overwhelming. cue downvotes from rich people :D
  • spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    Sales is not a good example as pay is so variable I once helped some one sort out a disagreement over a 15% cut to bonus That 15% cut was a lot more than the uk's median wage :-)
• mtrimpe 11y ago
  In Sweden all tax returns are public information and they seem to be managing quite well.
  • dogma1138 11y ago
    That's no longer true. Tax information isn't being posted online now in Sweden you can make a "FOIA" request but you have to have a legitimate reason now to obtain it. The public tax records were too often abused for harassment, political extortion and plain crime such as burglary and fraud so they pulled the plug on online publishing of tax records.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • tom_mellior 11y ago
      But isn't "I believe my company is treating me unfairly by paying me less for equal work" a legitimate reason?
      • brianwawok 11y ago
        Do you get full W2 type info, or just the joint income of the family? It would be hard to tell a coworkers income if it is lumped in with their spouses income + investment income + whatever.. vs seeing line item income for that person.
        • kpil 11y ago
          It's individual, but capital income is included.
    • kristoffer 11y ago
      No you don't need any reason. You can go to the tax office and use their public computer for example.
      • 11y ago
• Amezarak 11y ago
  > No matter how expertly this is pulled of, human jealousy is still a risk. I always hear this argument, and I wonder how often it really applies. I have coworkers who do basically the same job as me but get paid twice or more what I do for it. I don't sit around being jealous, I think about how I know it's possible for me to get paid that much and that's something I can aspire to. I suppose in other words, it's information about the salary ceiling. (Of course, that's still an incentive for management to try to make sure I don't know other people's salaries.) I've never heard anyone, in this environment or at my last job, complain enviously about other people making more money than them. The most I've ever heard on the subject is me and a couple other guys shook our heads discussing another guy who made much less money than we did and definitely deserved more.
  • cellularmitosis 11y ago
    I've never heard anyone... You'd be surprised at how petty some (otherwise very intelligent) people can be. At a former job, the company paid to send some of team A to a conference for platform B ($1100 / head), while some from team C were sent to conference D ($500 / head). When one member from team C found out about the price difference between the two conferences, he started bellyaching and said the company owed him another $600.
    • hyperpape 11y ago
      Is someone with that attitude ever not going to be a problem? I feel like if you could get offended by that, who knows what you'll be offended by. And if that affects how you work with others, your thin skin* is a liability. *Not saying that being offended is always bad--there are things that one reasonably might be offended by, just that this is one of them.
      • drdeca 11y ago
        I'm not sure, but I think you might have left out a "not" near the end of that. (Because "there are some X which are Y, but this X is not one of them" is a pattern I recognize as common, and "there are some X which are Y, but this is one of them" is not a pattern that I am familiar with)
• drumdance 11y ago
  It seems to work out okay in the NFL.
• jeffmould 11y ago
  I have seen the jealousy part this first hand. I went to work for a startup in the late 90s during the first "bubble". I was one of the first employees on-board and the company was ramping up quickly. The plan, as with most Internet startups at the time, was to IPO and everyone would be happy. Salaries and options were fairly quiet talk. No one really discussed them that I ever heard. Then we started preparing for the IPO. A few documents "accidentally" got included in a public filing. These documents included a list of current employees, their salaries, and the number of options they were granted. There was also one sales employee who had gotten an employment contract that was completely out of the norm of what others were getting paid. All of the sudden salaries and options became a major discussion point among employees. To make matters worse, prior to the IPO it was determined that too many options had been granted and they needed to rain in the grants. The solution was an 1 for 8 reverse split (meaning that if you were initially granted 8000 options you now only had 1000). This was kind of an icing on the cake morale blow for employees. It didn't help when the stock soared at the IPO and people were comparing what they should have made with what they actually made. EDIT - fixed typo
  • imh 11y ago
    Can you explain how such a split works? My understanding was that after those things, everyone still has the same percent of the company as before, right? So how does that affect your payout? Forgive me for being naive.
    • jeffmould 11y ago
      It is confusing, so I will try to break it down as simple as possible at least the way I understood/understand it. The reason the reverse split happened in the first place was that the company was trying to get a certain valuation with a certain opening price for the stock at IPO. With the number of shares they had granted in the option pool, hitting those target numbers was impossible. To adjust for this, it was decided to do a reverse split to reduce the number of shares out thus allowing them meet their valuation and opening price for the IPO. For example, if they wanted raise $8,000,000 on the IPO and have a $20 opening price they could only have 400,000 shares out. Instead they had 32,000,000 shares out. This would have meant to hit the same $8,000,000 raise, they would have had to open at $0.25. So to adjust they did the 1 for 8 reverse split meaning they went from the 32,000,000 shares to 400,000 shares out. Now they can open at $20 and raise their $8,000,000. Using the same example above, here is where it hits the employee. Let's say on opening day the company opens at $20. Now let's say in the original picture you owned 8000 shares and stock closed that day at $60. You would stand to have made approximately $320,000 ($480,000 - $160,000). However, now with the reverse split you now only have 1000 shares. The stock still opens at $20 and still closes at $60. But now you only made $40,000 ($60,000 - $20,000). That's the downfall of a reverse split. At least with a normal split (i.e. 2 for 1) you have an upside potential on earnings. This is how a lot of early employees of companies like Microsoft, Apple, Under Armour, etc... have made out significantly well for themselves. With a reverse split they are taking away shares so there is no upside.