Daelos said:
Why shouldn"t he know that information?
I"m serious... it may be a cultural thing, but I"ve worked in the UK and now in Norway, and you may not go around revealing your salary to the world, but I"ve never had people insist on keeping it secret, either.
If the subject is mentioned in conversation among friends, most people are quite happy to say what they earn.
And I am quite prepared to go into a Yearly Review with my manager and ask why Joe Bloggs makes $200 more than I do, if we add comparable value to the business.
As I said in my above post, I worked for a company where it was a written policy that comparing salary would result in discipline up to termination. No manager wants to explain why a co-worker is more qualified. And everyone thinks they are better than everyone else.
Now that I own my own business, I see where they are coming from. My top guy makes up to $30 an hour. I have guys that just start learning their trade that make $11 an hour (right now, the going rate for a general laborer in this economy is $8 an hour). We are a specialized type business, and it takes years for you to learn the skills to even be productive in what we do. The top guy has worked for the company for ten years, and has been trained in everything. I don"t even need to be there every day, because he can do it all. The bottom guy"s been there a week, has no training, and can"t do 10% of what the top guy could do. If the top guy is sick and I am not there, we shut down for the day. If the bottom guy is sick, we reshuffle personnel and don"t lose anything.
And the bottom guy expects to make exactly what the top guy does, will argue with me, and the top guy, and it causes a whole bunch of arguing. He really thinks his week"s worth of experience is the same as the guy who can do all the different labor responsbilities, maintain the equipment, and do estimates, sales and talk to customers.
I know its an extreme example, but people have such huge egos that they can"t stand the thought that their buddy might be more qualified. And I"ve had employees try to glom onto the top guy just to get more pay. I don"t care how many beers you guys drink together after work - you have alot to learn.
Its gotten to the point that I"ve told my employees that if they discuss someone else"s pay, they are fired. Cause if I don"t do it, I am spending all day arguing with the employee, and they are arguing with their direct supervisor. I am not a fool, I pay 50-100% more than what they can get in the market right now. But jealousy makes people do stupid things.
Last year, I fired my secretary over this. She tried to tell me she was in the same league as the guy making $30 an hour when all she did was answer phones. She tried to convince me she was running the business when I wasn"t there. When I said no raise, she started acting crazy, asking for her job description and being a bitch on wheels. When I told her I expected her to have a good attitude, because she talked to customers, she said she would not have a good attitude when talking to customers, and I canned her ass. I bet she wished she had kept her mouth shut. I just got a letter from the government telling me her unemployment benefits ran out, and that she had to apply to the federal gov"t to get more.
And alot of that came from the fact that she really saw herself as an equal to my Manager. She never did the work a day in her life, and she for sure wouldn"t be able to put prices on anything for customers. Her ego made her an equal to him, when she was really three rungs lower than him. And she determined that since I was being so unfair, she was going to yell at the top of her lungs at me everytime she saw me, and she was starting to be rude to customers.
To me, that is the problem with comparing pay. Its more trouble than its worth.