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Should you tell your co-workers how much you make? In a recent survey, 88 percent of respondents said no. I say, “You bet.” And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.
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It’s your salary. Don’t tell anyone.
The taboo is ingrained in American culture — so much so that in Money magazine’s 2007 Money and Morals poll, 88 percent of respondents agreed that “you should never let your co-workers know how much you make.” That’s right, 88 percent of respondents — more than those who agreed on any other ethical question about money — said you should never disclose salary information. They didn’t say they never had or they never would, but made the ethical determination you never should. If there’s a more corporate friendly taboo, I haven’t heard of it.
Unions fought for the right to disclose their salaries to their co-workers — businesses could prohibit their employees from revealing their wages until the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. And this was no frivolous fight: not only did secrecy give businesses the upper hand in salary negotiations with all their workers, it also masked discriminatory policies against any group that management felt was less than desirable — women, for example, or people of color.
In the decades that followed, Congress added to the protections against unfair wages. Throughout the sixties, it enacted laws prohibiting companies from paying workers less because of gender, race, color, age, religion, or national origin. And the 1991 Civil Rights Act further expanded workers’ rights, allowing victims of wage discrimination to sue for punitive damages. However, the taboo, no longer legally enshrined, stayed with us. As anyone who’s held a job knows, human-resource officers are masters of, implicitly or explicitly, making us feel that there’s something untoward about sharing our salaries
“It’s in bad taste,” said NYU’s Professor William Serrin, a former labor and workplace correspondent for The New York Times, though, like many I’ve spoken to, I couldn’t pin him down on why, exactly, he would consider it tacky. He said he had never disclosed his salary to his co-workers but freely admits that his research has gleaned valuable information from those with the poor taste to divulge the information.
Maybe some of the reticence comes from the notion, fostered by HR departments, that the workplace is one big family. Wages, then, are some sort of proxy of our parents’, uh, employers’ love. A 1994 Northwestern University study of soon-to-be MBA graduates found that more were willing to accept a job earning $75,000 when their peers earned the same amount, than were willing to accept a job paying $85,000 when they knew their colleagues were being paid $10,000 more. No one wants to be the unloved child, but as adults with families of our own, taking a see-no-salary, speak-no-salary, hear-no-salary approach to a compensation works counter to our economic interests.
With the vast majority of workers reluctant to act in “bad taste,” the wage rights we’ve gained over the past decades have been rendered moot by this one cultural taboo. Sure, we can legally share our salary information, but who would be gauche enough to ask the forbidden question?
Me.
Yes, I’ve decided to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of salaries high and low. I recently conducted an informal survey of recent and soon-to-be business journalism graduates, asking how much they earned. Do the human-resource gods Thor-like rain personnel files down upon me?
Of course not.
Worst case, I got scolded.
“You could have just asked me [whether] I’d tell you and saved me the embarrassment of actually giving out my salary information,” said Andy Greenberg, a classmate and reporter at Forbes.com, after I ambushed him with the salary question in a crowded study lounge. He, like most recent and soon-to-be business journalism graduates I spoke with, has a salary in the mid-$40,000s to low $50,000s. Bloomberg employees start out earning about 40 percent more, but then, a recent lawsuit alleges that if they get pregnant, they take a pay cut, so the fat paycheck is a double-edged sword.
Two subjects of my salary-discovery crusade wouldn’t answer. One laughed me off and the other explained that, as a former compensation profession, he never disclosed his salary to any non-compensation professionals. The others — exhibiting varying degrees of discomfort — answered the question. And the exercise paid off. I’ll now go into any upcoming salary negotiations with my eyes fully open. Did my classmates find it refreshing to openly talk about salary? Will wage transparency spread until we all know what our colleagues are paid? Or did people just find it less awkward to answer the direct question than to evade it?
My money’s on avoiding awkwardness. But there’s one person (other than me) who has no problem asking you what you earn.
Your boss.
Remember sending in your salary history when you got your last job? Corporate culture might find it morally repugnant for you to disclose your salary or bonuses to co-workers, but ethics end at management’s door. And your boss isn’t asking out of prurient interest. He wants to have all relevant information when it comes time to negotiate your pay. After all, for all the talk of the workplace being like a family, he’s ultimately responsible to the shareholders, and paying you more than he needs to doesn’t fatten the bottom line. But acting like a dad telling you to keep your allowance secret from your siblings certainly does serve his ends. It allows the company to discriminate with impunity, which happens more than you might think. Even Wal-Mart, the country’s largest employer, is embroiled in a class-action lawsuit alleging it has been systematically discriminating against its female employees. And even when a company offers truly equal opportunities, it can take advantage of workers who just don’t negotiate very well.
Of course, as any human-resource manager will point out to you, knowing your co-workers’ salaries can be uncomfortable. Who wants to find out you’re earning less than lazy Sue in accounting when you’re always taking up her slack? What white guy wants to know that he’s earning more than the industrious black guy down the hall? And who wants to be faced with the cruel reality that you’re simply not worth as much to your company as your better paid colleagues? At the end of the day, won’t knowing colleagues’ salaries make it more difficult to get down to the business of actually working?
Of course not. Chief executives of public companies, union members, government employees, and non-profit managers all disclose their salaries — if not to the exact dollar, at least to a pretty specific range. No low-wage employee went postal on the NVR CEO Paul Saville when his salary grew from less than $1 million to more than $10 million in two years. Union members somehow manage to work together during salary negotiations. And the sometimes exorbitant executive-director salaries published on GuideStar haven’t stopped entry-level non-profit employees from working long hours at low wages.
It might temporarily make office relationships tense, but you’re always better off knowing how much your colleagues earn. If lazy Sue is being paid more than you, it’s time to renegotiate your salary. If a co-worker is being discriminated against, she has every right to know, and you have the responsibility to tell her. And if you’re just not worth very much to your company, well, it’s probably time to get a new job.
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