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?

If you allow yourself to be kept on a low wage then you're the problem. True story.

If this is the UK it's not legal to have this policy in place, employees are allowed to share pay details. Companies try this when they know they have an unfair system.

Bollocks. All the private companies I worked for throughout my 40 year career had this, going back to the 1980s.
almost all private companies that are large, trying to at least be ethical, have been doing this for years

Organisations depend on employees being foolish enough not to discuss salaries as otherwise the organisation would come under pressure to rectify pay disparities.

Because they're usually the lower earners who get shafted which is why there are special protections in law to protect these groups. Have you heard of the equality act, what rock do you live under 🙄

Er, because that what research into pay gaps show as 2 of the biggest groups of pay injustice. Afro- Caribbean/ black decent get penalised more than Asian decent apparently- that’s the good old unconscious bias coming into play .

I agree it's normal, but also that it's used to hide pay disparities which almost always favour men.

I wonder if you could make a FOI request asking for actual salaries of everyone in your role (without names) ? You definitely can ask for breakdown of male/female pay.

I would be suspicious that they are paying some people VERY high salaries that do not reflect the value they bring to the table. It looks bad, and kills morale.

Also, when people are negotiating wage and other factors (eg flexible or home working) they only have a certain number of bargaining ‘chips’ to use.

And so people who need to negotiate flexible working (yep, mainly the mothers of young children) will have less bargaining chips available to negotiate pay. As will eg disabled people who need some home working days etc.

Plus as already said rewarding someone solely for their negotiating skills seems odd when you think about it. In my twenty years of working those with the ‘best’ negotiating skills are those who are the best bullshitters and spend their endlessly pontificating and holding meetings, without getting much actual work done.

I think it's legal to have the confidentiality clause, but would be hard if not impossible to make it stick due to the Equality Act. As most employees won't be discussing salaries for shits and giggles but to work out if they're being paid fairly.

So it's just a culture of private companies discouraging it and making it seem a risky thing to do for their own purposes.

Course I've heard of it. The list is endless what it covers. Just wondered why this poster singled out women and black people.

How do you know you aren't being illegally discriminated against if you don't even know how much you earn compared to your colleagues?

Most people in the country work in an organisation where you can look up pay rates online. Some people work in organisations where their specific seniority/rank is part of their uniform, so you can tell what they earn by looking at them.

What this does is make evaluations person's contribution more relevant. Instead of asking "I wonder what they earn?" people ask "Are they worth the money?" which is actually healthier.

In commercial/corporate settings, the asymmetry of information is a tactic used by HR departments to keep employees in the dark. The only reason for this is to make their life easier when having performance reviews, and to perpetuate situations where some people are grossly underpaid. Often those people are women.

There is no excuse for it. It is lazy and anti-competitive. That is why Glassdoor is so popular. It is also why working in commercial/corporate settings is so miserable for so many people. I'd venture that lack of pay transparency actually means that on balance, companies have to pay more overall ... so it's a self-defeating policy to boot.

You do know that men will nearly always negotiate higher salary rises , even when women and men go after the same amount. Lots of research to prove this.
if it was down to just experience, skills, talent then fair dos. It isn’t . Unconscious bias, at the least, has a lot to do with it, particularly at hire stage when the candidate is not well known to the company and it’s all based on impression during interviews. Men particularly generally big themselves up, tell more “mistruths” and exaggeration, and even the language they use is more aligned to the language looked for by the predominantly male recruiters. Agian look at research on this about how male leadership style dominates recruitment language and penalises women and disabled.

It was definitely a requirement when I last worked in the private sector (left 2011) but I found this

"Since the introduction of the Equality Act in 2010, you have the right as an employee to discuss salary. This means that your employer has no legal standing to stop you talking about what you earn, with anyone you work with."

But that’s not what you said, your very specific last line was you wished to know what your peers earn, and there is nothing in that statement you quoted that said disciplinary if disclosed

They don't want people to work out the women are earning 30 per cent less or more for the same job.
They can't tell you what to do with personal information. Share away and see how colleagues react

No, because FOI only applies to government bodies, not private companies!

It’s amazing how I indoctrinated people are to in the UK to secret salaries. Whilst it’s not black and white the open salary trend is far better at protecting you and your interests. Hiding salaries protects the company. Read more in link:
openwage.com/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-pay-transparency/

What's your reason for saying this? I don't think it's obvious why this is better. Can you clarify?

The sooner salaries are completely transparent the better obviously.

Companies who are so secretive about their pay are likely to have massive discrepancies, most likely at a disadvantage to women

They are two marginalised groups who are often underpaid. What should I have written?

People are entitled to privacy about what they are paid.

Where I work there's a small group of women who are utterly convinced that the "management" are underpaying them deliberately because they are women.

This has been going on for the five years I've worked there.

They ask people what they earn. Great, you might say, but to me that just shows a complete lack of respect for a person's right to privacy. Of course people can say they don't want to share but these women are loud grievance mongers and I expect many don't want to risk their ire as they are nasty and never let their grievances go. After meetings with them, their peers do tell me that their behaviour is disgraceful but stay absolutely silent whilst they are making accusations. They write emails saying I trust my manager but unless I'm told what everyone else is earning I will assume you are not being truthful about paying equally.

So am I in favour of secrecy to cover up ? No, I think people should have their privacy respected.

And am I am manager who deliberately lies to cheat women?

No, I am literally the person doing the Equal pay audits.

Its me you think goes to work every day, chats to senior managers and says, pay her less and we'll keep it secret. We have a secret conspiracy to do this. We meet secretly to approve men's pay rises. All companies have secret "cheat the women" policies.

It all top secret. Woops, I just let slip.

There's a lot of truth in this.

In some jobs in the private sector, such as law, there are set pay scales at junior levels and you can look up what individual firms pay, e.g. a first year trainee, a second year trainee, a newly qualified solicitor, a NQ+1 etc. for the first few years. After that it's "dependent on performance" and there's no more transparency. I'm guessing that's the moment where the men start to pull ahead significantly, especially since it coincides with the time a lot of women start taking maternity leaves.

Where I work (in law but not in a law firm and not in the UK) we don't tend to discuss our salaries in detail but there is no general rule about it. My manager told me that he knows how much his female counterpart owns and vice versa, so clearly it would be OK for me to discuss my own salary with other team members.

A few years ago a guy joined my team from a well known company in a high paying sector. My manager told me that my salary was higher than this guy's, but I have no way of knowing whether that was true or not. My manager probably thought he could rely on me not asking the other guy because we hated each other. And I thought there was no point in asking him because he would definitely have lied and told me he was on more than he was actually on. He lied about everything, including on his CV. Amazingly, he put on his CV that he speaks fluent Spanish, which he definitely doesn't, and got away with it despite the fact that our boss is half Spanish and could have tested him at any time. He's now left, and is earning megabucks somewhere else, but frankly I'm just glad he's gone.

Last year my manager and his female counterpart did a benchmarking exercise and went to senior management with a business case for our entire team getting a fairly substantial pay rise, due to the fact that our salaries were already lagging a little bit below the market and with inflation it was only going to get worse. We were told that everyone in the team would be getting a percentage rise based on our level of seniority, with the more junior members getting a higher percentage pay rise because they were on lower salaries. We were told not to discuss it with anyone outside the team, or with people in our sister companies, because the company couldn't afford to do the same for everyone.

I don’t know if ours is written down is any many words but for years we haven’t even had published salary bands by grade so you really have no idea where you stand compared to others doing the same role. The gender pay gap report is so vague it’s not worth the paper it’s written on and I work in a male dominated industry but the lower grades of admin staff are predominantly, if not all, female so that potentially skews it more than if they did the gap at comparable grades and roles,