Trend story alert! The New York Times Sunday Style section yesterday proclaimed a new habit among young professionals: Openly discussing salaries. For what it's worth, I think it's accurate to say that workers under 30 today are much comfortable than our parents were in disclosing how much we earn. I, for one, know the approximate salaries of most of my friends and many of my acquaintances. But rather than attribute this to generational openness thanks to MySpace and Facebook (as many of the Times' sources do), I'd say the key factor is that we live in extremely uncertain economic times in which most employees have no representation or support at work. In a unionized workplace, there is a publicized pay scale and an organization on your side when you enter into negotiations. But the vast majority of us today are standing alone. Knowing what colleagues or competitors earn is one of the only ways to effectively advocate for yourself. As the Times reports:
Janet Polli, 32, who lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, works in sales and marketing for a nonprofit organization. A few years ago, she and a colleague were both selected for a promotion at a nonprofit, and Ms. Polli suggested they share salary information as a negotiating tool.
“I wanted to be open, like a union,” she recalled. “We would get more if we were together.”
But the other woman “was very secretive in her negotiations,” she said. “In the end, neither of us did very well.”
That's why effective fair pay legislation would not only make it easier for workers to file pay discrimination claims, but would also stop employers from penalizing workers for sharing salary information. Lily Ledbetter, for example, had to rely upon an anonymous tipster to learn that the men at her level at Goodyear Tire were earning far more than she was for the same work. Keeping salary information under tabs most often benefits not workers, but employers.
--Dana Goldstein
