I don't know how much my coworkers get paid. Do you?
I believe Whole Foods has a directory of how much each employee makes. When I was promoted to my current position, I was told explicitly not to tell my coworkers how much I make. I think it's odd that people are so uptight about money. My fiancee gets mad when I tell people how much we paid for our new house. I think it's unimportant, and people ask, so I tell them (anyway it's public record, but that's totally beside the point of this discussion). People have or don't have money for lots of reasons. The problem is that we view financial success as a proxy for human worth, so telling someone who has a lower salary than you how much you make is ostensibly telling them that you think their life has less value than yours. I totally disagree. None of us can account for our own good or bad fortune. None of us controls what it is we find exciting about life. I can tell any young person from experience that money <<<< having a career you're excited about. It would be interesting if tax returns were public. It could turn the IRS into a useless organization, since all data could be crowdsourced, and the community would become the watchmen (because fuck you if you're stealing my roads, schools, and police force). It would also allow us to interrogate companies that routinely have different pay for equal jobs. I'm sure this is a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but it's an interesting thought experiment, if nothing else.
I was told by my boss-type thing that myself and all the interns at the company make the same wage per hour. I was also told to work one day less a week than the other two interns. Two days ago, we got our first paycheck. In the kitchen one of the interns starts talking about all the fat stacks he's counting now, and mentions his paycheck. That's when I found out I made 10 hours worth of work more than him in 3 weeks, despite working 8 hours less a week. I told him I made the exact same amount, which was still baffling on its own. Maybe the reason this problem is flourishing and workers aren't made aware, is because whoever is profiting more has nothing to complain about!
I don't tell my coworker how much I'm paid because he's a level below me and desperate to get promoted, but doesn't have much of a spine - he'll ask me to ask my boss if he can do things, for instance, instead of asking her himself. His desperation to get promoted is already off-putting but his clear inability to stand up enough for himself nixxed it in my book. I have no interest in dealing with petty jealousy especially if you are unable to prove that you are worthy of being promoted. It is not my problem that I am younger, and (on paper in this realm only) more successful. I think in large corporations some amount of transparency has come into the equation when you talk about "pay grades" and "if you're in this position you will make this range." It is better than starting from 0. Of course, it is also a long way off from solid numbers.
How in the world did this get conflated with pay gaps to specific groups of people? Listen, companies will pay the least amount they can, regardless of what group you're in. That white male working beside you? Yeah, they want to pay him less too. This has nothing to do with discrimination and everything to do with companies trying to avoid morale issues amongst their workers while also trying to minimize labor costs over time.
There's a section in the article pretty far down that discusses the pay gap between women and men and how even when women attempt to be more aggressive in negotiating their salaries (a trait sometimes attributed as the reason why men are paid more) it backfires. That's how the subject was looped in.
I'm not saying you looped it in, I'm saying it's silly reasoning period, regardless of who introduced it. also, the aggressive negotiating of salaries isn't the only thing attributed to why men are paid more than women. The statistic doesn't take into account that men work more hours than women (statistically, women tend to work part-time, men tend to work over-time), nor does it generally take into account years of experience or years working. I'm specifically thinking about a study they did with doctors in which they not only looked at doctors, but they looked at specialists who had worked roughly the same number of years (they weren't comparing a brain surgeon with 30 years experience with one who only had 2, for example), and they found the salaries to be on par with one another. Most of this will continue not being mentioned by a lot of people who want to push the idea of the patriarchy specifically because it goes against that narrative, and that's unfortunate.
I have to admit I'm confused by your response, perhaps it's because you cherry picked the quote? I really don't know, but your response seems strange to me.I'm not saying you looped it in, I'm saying it's silly reasoning period, regardless of who introduced it.
