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?

Remember HR is there to protect the business

I've always openly discussed my salary with colleagues. A manager at a law firm I worked for asked me to stop. I said no. If the salaries are fair it shouldn't matter if people know how much each person earns. He said fair enough and left it at that.

I am surprised that many of the early responses are defending wage secrecy. It might be common but that doesn't make it a good thing. It is bad for equality in pay and as others have now pointed it, that tends to weigh on women and minority groups.

I think Norway has it right - you can view anyone's tax return. Complete transparency.

Are you very old?

I don't think I would take advice from someone who writes "renumerate".

Pay privacy is not the same as to "conceal".

It's not illegal in any sector.

Pay bands are not the same as a person's pay.

Disclosure rules are quite limited.

Addressing anyone expecting privacy as "old fashioned" is really quite naive and rude.

There's no pay gap for women aged 40 and under and there hasn't been for some time.

The pay gap for older women is due to detrimental treatment in education and career access at the beginning of our working lives, not unequal pay now.

But yeah, we are just old fashioned.

Ghastly attitude.

People should discuss salaries. Otherwise, companies will continue to pay lower salaries to women

watch this and understand why

Currently I work in public sector and everyone has a designated grade for their job. It's not really discussed but everyone knows what grade everyone else is on, so can make a guess within about 5k as to what they are on.

Previous work in the private sector was exactly as you describe, very very secretive. Sometimes salaries and bonuses would be found out, and there was a large difference between individuals doing the same roles.

Salaries are public knowledge in Sweden, according to this article www.ft.com/content/2a9274be-72aa-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9

Strike days

Public sector - millions
Private sector -

Yeah, the public sector pay approach is really successful.

Totally normal. I worked in a role which gave me sight of payroll details (though it was not my department). A lot of salaries depended on whether you joined at good times or not. I earned more that highly qualified people, who had more responsibility & were under a lot more stress than me.

In one of my jobs, there was a group of us the same age, same qualifications, same role, same hours, etc.... Turns out that one person was being paid more than the rest of us. Everyone was talking about it and getting upset over it.

Well apart from me who was oblivious to it (yeah I was really popular lol) until the manager called me in to the office to apologize, remind me that it was in my contract to not discuss wages and to give me a pay rise so we were all on the same wage. Haha

I don't think you understand really .

Strikes have been extremely successful . Look at the increases secured in wages

Striking is part of having a unified ( unionized ) labour force which can act as a collective to get access to the best conditions for its cohort of workers

I can only imagine that those people saying that you shouldn't discuss pay with your colleagues are either managers whose life would be made harder if salaries were out in the open or they know full well that they aren't worth as much as they are being paid (and are scared in case everyone else knows it too).

It is rather strange that the clerical and admin parts of an organisation (including payroll and most transactional HR processes) are fulfilled disproportionately by women, and that the culture of secrecy perpetuated by these functions in many commercial organisations exists specifically in order to disadvantage workers with less bargaining power, confidence, or security, and that such workers tend disproportionately to be women.

It's almost as if being shitty isn't a man/women thing, but a thing that all people have a tendency to do to each other, if allowed unchecked, regardless of which allegedly disadvantaged minority special interest group they belong to (*).

(* see, for example Priti Patel, Suella Braverman etc. etc.)

I would honestly feel so resentful.

I work for the civil service and everyone's pay band is no secret, I couldn't imagine working somewhere where someone doing the exact same role, at the exact same level could be paid more than me and I'd be clueless. Why the secrecy? All it does is allows them to get away with paying some people less than they are worth, more often than not women. It allows wage disparity to go on.

This type of secrecy only benefits one type of demographic though. If not exact figures then scales/bands should be visible to all who work in an organisation. I can't see any controversy about why not either.

This is the clause in the companies I've worked for. Of course they don't want people discussing because it will lead to lots of people asking for more!

I hate how everyone is saying that this is normal and we should not talk about our wage.

This is exactly why wage disparity exists! Transparency should be common place.

Or rather that should say 'shouldn't be able to discuss pay'.

As I understand it (and I am not a lawyer, so please bear that in mind) it is a slightly grey area in that while an employer can put a clause in your contract saying you should not discuss pay, it is almost certainly unenforceable thanks to the Equality Act of 2010.

Extremely successful, apart from all the private sector industries that were destroyed by striking that is? And no longer exist in this country to strike? With the outcome that the only sector still addicted to striking is the public sector that can't actually go bust and has to be funded? Really successful.

I don't understand, I'm too old fashioned. Those of us who lived through the strike shutdowns in the 70s are old fashioned and don't understand how much this improved industry.

Personally, I think women in particular should be open about what they earn if they want to be.

why? We’re historically paid much less than our male counterparts and we need to start being savvy when negotiating salaries.

i started a new job last year. My friend already worked there and when I told her what I was going to ask for as a salary she encouraged me
to add £10k on to it. I did and they accepted. I’m £10k better off than I would have been if I’d said nothing.

The article is right, transparency.

This kind of thinking within a company screams to me that there is going to be vast differences in salaries between people that are essentially doing the same job.
Of course they don't want you to know that Incompetent Sam earns more than you do!
In theory this means that the more productive/skilled people can justifiably be given higher salaries, but in practice the pay rises tend to go to those who are good at talking themselves up.

Pay grades/scales are much more transparent and fairer IMO.

How do you know this? You seem really certain!

The evidence shows the opposite. The difference is occupational, not individual salary level.

The reductions in the UK wide pay gap are due to more women moving into management occupations over 40 and this is tied to the generational discrimination women have experienced.

It's such a shame that the general discourse about gender pay gap reporting has convinced women they are routinely being cheated and deliberately so by the women that work in HR.

ONS data below.
www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/genderpaygapintheuk/2022
The clearest insight into the gender pay gap is provided by analysis across age groups. For groups aged under 40 years, the gender pay gap for full-time employees (which is a more homogenous basis than all employees for measuring differences in hourly pay) is low, at 3.2% or below. This has been the case since 2017.

However, for age groups aged 40 to 49 years and older, the gender pay gap for full-time employees is much higher, at over 10.9%. Our 2019 analysis explored the types of occupation that men and women work in, by age group. It flagged a lower incidence of women moving into higher-paid managerial occupations after the age of 39 years, at which point pay in these occupations increases.