Secret Pay Rise

[Legaleagleplease]

Hi All, I am hoping that one of the MN group has some experience they can share on this topic. My company is uber secretive about pay rises and bonuses.
I am suspicious why this is.

You are told that you will be disciplined if you tell anyone else what you earn. I am not sure this is legal or not, it certainly does not sound ethical.

The exact words from the HR Manager are:
You are reminded that information regarding your remuneration is strictly confidential and should not be divulged to colleagues.

AIBU to want clarity on what my peers earn?

It's not unusual to have this clause in a contract.

I don't disagree with it either.

Some people are better at a job than someone else. They may get more work done or bring in my business.

You may not went to lose them so pay them more!

To me it tells me the company have a lot of people earning vastly different salaries. If it was a standard amount and equal there would be no need for it to be a secret.

Where I work everyone is working on a totally transparent payscale. It’s a good way to work from my perspective as I know everyone who does my job earns the same. Not exactly because for the first three years it rises in £1,000 increments each year and after 3 years you are on the top of that pay scale. The only way to earn more would be to apply for a role in the next banding.

I’m actually really surprised about some of these comments, surely transparency will only help women, who lets face it generally earn less.

I am not complaining about how much I earn or how much my salary is. I have been working over 30 years and earn well into six figures.
I also do not think that everybody should be paid the same. Different people deserve different pay, commensurate with responsibility and experience.
My issue is the thought police controlling what I say to my peers. Chances are they would gain more than me from it as they may just blindly accept whatever is given. If there is nothing sinister and pay awards are defendable why hide it?

It is normal IN THE UK. In other countries money is not considered a taboo or distasteful subject to discuss. In many European countries your personal payments, taxes etc are all freely available and searchable, so you can see exactly how much your colleagues are earning. Keeping salaries secret is a race to the bottom. Why is it acceptable in private industry, but not the public service?

It’s not legally enforceable to discipline someone for discussing their salary but naturally, it’s discouraged. The same way I wouldn’t want someone to go up to our roof and hang off the edge.

You don’t have a right to know your colleagues’ salary or circumstances though and if someone wanted to discuss mine I wouldn’t take it well.

Why single out woman and black people?

Well I have made quite a good career out of it for the last 30+ years 😂

Are posters still in the 1970s?

I didn't say they could take legal action. The result of holding them responsible could be that the person suffers legal if questionable consequences in their role.

@Doyoumind what legal consequences?

Absolutely agree with you. This is pretty outrageous to say that people can’t tell others what their salary is, and definately it’s protecting some pay anomalies they know they have - otherwise why would they be bothered if they could defend it

In reputable companies they will publish pay scales - so at each grade you know the ranges of salary and can therefore judge where you are on scale and query that if you feel you are too low on scale. You can do that without having to know the exact salary of anyone else. But generally you do know what scale others are on and again all jobs should be in defined in terms of relevant pay scales as part of their job description which is available on line to anyone

personally, I don’t think even that goes far enough. Even in my companies that were all pretty relaxed about telling you exactly where on scale you were, and what was needed to get a rise up scale, very few people ever shar3d their exact salary. Whether we like it or not , where there is unfairness in pay it will almost always be people with protected characteristics that are being penalised such as women, ethnic minorities, disabled etc. we see that in pay gaps as a result of even fairly benign “unconscious bias” including the still appalling pay gap for women that opens out once they become mothers or older. We will not get rid of unconscious bias until pay is out in the open. Lots of countries do this- people get used to it. Right now people aren’t comfortable as pay is secret for a reason - becuase it is often unfair.

if your company is telling you to not talk about your own pay then they are covering up that they know there is unfairness and unconscious bias. They will know this as they have to publish gender pay gap- do you know what your companies gender pay gap is? That is first thing to challenge legitimately - ask them to prove that your salary is not impacted by gender pay gap. Ask for data, analysis etc of anonymous salrieries by sex on your pay grade to prove it

It can cause issues. We have a team member who is quite frankly useless, she’s an older lady (this is relevant) and simply won’t/can’t do certain tasks (think join a Teams meeting, refuses to use Teams - just shuffles her chair over to peer over someones shoulder instead). She says I’m too old for this new fangled nonsense - she’s 67. Won’t retire as she hates her husband (retired and sits in the chair with the paper all day). We spend hours training her on stuff, simple emails etc, won’t do them, transferring calls, nope - she’ll walk the length of the building to deliver a message in person. She’s been with us years, was employed to deal with paperwork (think filing etc), times have moved on now and it’s now 80% digital. She then forgets what we have shown her by the next day/week. So we repeat…..and repeat. She earns 5K a year more than us.

It’s not illegal to put this dated and nasty clause in a contract, but it’s not legally enforceable.

I work in legal sector and would never work for anyone who put a clause like that in my contract.

This is a contributor to gender pay gap. Disgusting really.

Secrecy allows gender pay gaps, maternity pay penalties etc to flourish.

Such clauses are less common than they used to be. Contrary to what has been said up thread, they can be legally enforceable depending on the circumstances. However, an employer cannot prevent employees disclosing salaries if they are investigating whether there is an equal pay issue. Such disclosures are protected. If an employer penalises someone and they are able to show that they were trying to identify a potential equal pay issue, the employee may be able to make a claim for discrimination.

All the permanent jobs I've done and most of the temporary ones over many decades have been in the public sector, where you know pretty much to the penny how much all your colleagues earn simply by knowing their grade and length of service, barring performance related scale positioning and small bonuses for exceptional (measurable, recorded) achievements. That seems much healthier to me than this secrecy lark. There would otherwise be frequent cases of either positive or negative discrimination, even if subconscious, where remuneration depends on the manager's opinion, or for that matter the performance of the team you've been allocated to whether or not you are responsible for its overall results. I say, if they've got nothing to hide, why hide it? Oh, because then they'd all want a bigger piece of the pie. If the employer can't demonstrate it's been fairly sliced, maybe they should be getting more, eh?

The exact words from the HR Manager are:

You are reminded that information regarding your remuneration is strictly confidential and should not be divulged to colleagues.

if those are the "exact words" they aren't saying you will be disciplined for talking about your remuneration. They need to say something like "discussing your remuneration is subject to disciplinary procedures" or similar.

if I were you I wouldn't discuss you pay with colleagues, it never ends well.

And allows the company to keep you and your colleagues on a low wage for years with tiny pay increases and then have new hires on a much higher starting wage then the long term employees earn after years of loyalty. True story.

This has to do with poor management, not pay secrecy (especially as you know her pay🤷🏼‍♀️)
in any company that doesn’t have formal performance reviews and performance improvement programmes then this will happen. Nowt to do with her being old- I’m retired and mix in groups of 80 plus year old women doing team meetings, whatapp groups etc. many managers will not address poor performance. Many companies don’t have formal systems to guide a manager through how to address poor performance from one of their reports. And many more companies don’t have a culture of all employee feedback , where (within a certain framework like “STARs”) any team member can provide specific defined feedback to another team member and their manager which will ensure these sort of performance issues are identified and addressed.

"They would need to say..." I mean

I'm surprised by how many people think we shouldn't discuss salaries. The more open we are about it, the more employers are held to account for fairness and equality. In many countries it is absolutely normal to discuss salaries. An employer should be able to justify any differences e.g. two people with the same title but one has more experience, or has led bigger projects, so their salary reflects that. In reality, the secrecy around pay means some people are unaware how much less they are being paid than colleagues and therefore do not realise their own value. They don't negotiate for more pay because they simply don't know that their role might be worth more. And we all know that (generally) it is women who get the short end of the stick on this.

OP is not saying that the employer should reveal details of individual staff pay; she is querying the clause in her contract that forbids her from discussing her salary, bonus etc with others. As a PP said, I'm pretty sure this is not legal in the UK.

🤦‍♀️yes . You can. That’s exactly why they’re stopping it- they cannot justify the pay inequalities.
when you’ve informed yourself about the gender pay gap and other pay gaps as a result of unconscious bias , maybe you’ll realise that your attitude is laying you right open to someone taking the piss over what you’re paid
other people want to ensure they’re paid fairly, and not subject to unconscious bias. As most women will, at some point in their career, experience this , it is a very naive attitude to have

We have the policy of not being able to discuss pay.

Simple reason is, everyone's pay is different depending on what they negotiated when they were offered the job.

Some do say what they earn and aren't happy. I'm keeping my mouth shut.