First off, if you are not allowed to share your salary. DON’T. It’s usually grounds for getting fired so check your employee handbook before you do it.
After reading Jim’s story on salary sharing, and the accompanying NY Times article, I’ll give you a Marxist economic analysis of why you should share your salary. (I’m joking about the Marxist part. I read Das Kapital in college with a prominent Marxist scholar and it cracks me up that he makes a ton of money as a socialist.)
The main thing in a free market economy is the value of information. It’s possible to have any kind of arbitrage simply because of a gap in information where the buyer has no knowledge of the seller’s cost.
In the case of salary, it’s a little different, but still the same. You are the seller of labor (a Marxist view of the world) and the buyer of labor is your employer. However, you are in a marketplace of labor providers (other job candidates) and you need to differentiate your labor on the basis of quality to command a better price. But you also have to price yourself within a reasonable range. Tools like Salary.com, salary surveys, published annual ranges, etc will help you set the range, the best way is honestly to talk to your peers in the field about what they make.
Like Jim, I work in IT consulting with the Federal government. (Of course I do. I live in DC!) I nearly kicked myself when I found out I should have asked my company for $100K. But honestly, I don’t think I can command that price. My friend who was advocating that kind of money could justify his asking price with the kind of skills he possesses. I don’t have that same skill set so I lowballed myself slightly, but not embarrassingly. It would have helped me set a better price had I known my friend was applying to the same company I was and discussed our strategies for our starting salary figures. I might have squeezed out another $5K from it, but I think I did just fine.
More than anything, knowing your current market value is the key. Sure, it’s good to know what the company is willing to pay. But you really have to know what you are worth as an individual provider of labor. If you are worth $50K and the company is only willing to pay $45K, then find another employer because there is someone out there who is willing to value you appropriately. I learned this the hard way while working technical support. Support jobs are bottom of the barrel and full of stress. But some companies pay better than others and are willing to promote people out of support work. I had to have a client toss a reality brickbat at my head and tell me that my skills were worth $20K-35K more than I was earning in support. And he was willing to pay me that!!!
The Man keeps us down by obscuring salary information. We’re usually not allowed to know what our peers make in the same job function. They hide things with unpublished pay grades. (Private companies around DC love ‘pay grades’. The government uses them and it seems like it’s fair to have grades till you find out that you don’t know what ranges they represent in the private sector because they are in no way correlated to the government’s published GSA pay grade schedules.) You have to guess if your grade is a managerial one and if you’re going to get a manager’s bonus or a regular employee bonus. (In my case, 10% vs $1500. Uh, that’s a huge difference at a $50K salary.) Shop job postings to see what places are willing to pay for jobs like yours or the jobs you want to have. Frequently there are ranges added to ads to entice candidates or give them a realistic view of what the employer will pay. Use it to your advantage.
I’m not a big advocate of having poor manners. Obviously be judicious in your sharing of a salary and whom you ask. Make sure you trust your friends when you share this information. I usually don’t discuss this sort of thing in-house with fellow employees. The one time I did, the guy had moved out of my department and received a promotion. I didn’t think it hurt to tell him because we were both pretty unhappy with our company. I also tend to discuss salary with my manager because I expect him/her to go to bat for me or help me get to my salary aspiration.
Transparency is key though. If you want to stick it to The Man, then share your salary. Find out what others make in your field and make sure you get yours!
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This is always something I wonder about! I will be working in academia. My postdoctoral position will be NIH funded…and therefore there is a set pay scale. However, once I enter academia there is really no certain salary. It is contingent on experience, public v. private, research I v. liberal arts, how much teaching v. how much research, 9 mo. salary v. 12 mo. salary, etc. I’ve gotten ballpark figures from people that range from 40K – 60K for a tenure-track position in behavioral sciences.
I work in general IT and had a banner year last year — cleared between 250 and 300K via a combo of W-2, bonus, and consulting. It was too many hours and not enough personal time. This year will be probably closer to 170K.
I work in sales. I am underpaid in comparision to some of my co-workers. Last year I made 40k with bonuses that averaged $500 per month.
I’m a MSW social worker and I made $58K last year but I work in a community mental health setting.
“If you are worth $50K and the company is only willing to pay $45K, then find another employer because there is someone out there who is willing to value you appropriately”
Yeah, that! Oh if I could just get that through the partner’s head — and we’re not talking a measly 5K difference in worth/willing either. Sigh, maybe someday soon that thought will sink in.
I’m a Staff I at one of the Big 4 accounting firms and my salary is $52K this year.
While some judicious sharing of information can be useful, as mentioned care needs to be taken – it is easy to rub management (i.e. the people who set your salary and bonus and decide promotions) the wrong way if they realise what you are doing. Also, there are real risks in not making like for like comparisons either as to the employee’s value (skill set, experience, work levels and competence) and the job you are comparing your’s to.
As a final point, getting a good salary is important, but for those at the early stage of your career, building a good cv and getting the right training and experience are much more important.
Even worse, some people will outright lie about their salary.
My favorite work environment I’ve ever seen posted everyone’s salaries on a list and all salary increases were done by majority vote. The boss would propose a raise for a worker, everyone knew the amount of the proposed raise and who was getting it, and they’d vote by secret ballot with a public vote count. Seriously. You know what? There was absolutely no complaining about salaries at that company, because everyone was involved with the decision.
LOL – I hadn’t meant for people to post their salaries in the comments, but OK!
You have to be judicious about sharing your salary. For instance, I won’t share mine here and generally try to obscure it in other ways since my friends read my blog. But if they flat out asked me, of course I would tell them. It doesn’t really bother me since most of us are IT geeks.
Also, if management finds out and gets irritated by your activities to ferret out what others make, you can often be fired, so BE CAREFUL.
It kills me that people will lie about their salary. It’s one thing to bump it up per the benefits and perqs you get at a job for a salary negotiation, and quite another thing to keep up with the Joneses for ego’s sake.
I think this post was too smart for me. My head hurts
Last place I worked had “open book” accounting where every one’s salary was known. I found it added a lot of distractions but the whole shroud of secrecy you mention is also ridiculous.
I work in management for a company that has some 80k+ employees. While attending a training seminar last month, we were told by the attorney giving the presentation that it was recently determined the non-management employees can share their salary information with their co-workers without breaking policy. Somehow the courts ruled that employees can’t be discplined for it.
I just had a whole lot of fun with my employer (I’m a federal contractor) over the question of salary discussions. The National Labor Relations Act and the First Amendment both say it’s your right to discuss your salary with anyone in the world. You can’t–and certainly shouldn’t–try to demand that anyone tell you their salary, of course. But the corporate argument that it’s wrong to discuss salary with coworkers is a transparent ploy to prevent people from realizing they’re underpaid, and it particularly hurts women and members of racial minorities. Don’t believe the hype. Of course, protecting your right to free speech and open salary negotiation could get you fired for the wrong reasons and then entangle you in a really exciting court case, but it’s important to know that you have the legal right to do it.
Ooh, and it’s also important to know that your right to discuss your own salary is a right you can’t sign away via an employment contract. Contracts and company policy books that require you to sign statements that you promise not to discuss your salary are not legally binding–according to my lawyer and a couple of other lawyers I discussed my situation with, it’s like signing a medical waiver or an agreement to do something illegal–that stuff isn’t and can’t be binding.