When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'

[Marxist]

Please, see what was achieved in the paris commune, the free ukraine territories, etc.. I have hope.

Don't, it's a fool's errand.

To understand why you need to know that there are two interpretations of Pandora's Box, the positive one that hope remained inside, and the negative interpenetration, that hope remained inside. Hope is a curse, it keeps you from doing what must be done because you hope that it won't be necessary, which usually isn't true. Don't hope, act. You might be wrong but you can never be accused of sitting on the sidelines while the world burned, unless of course, you are at peace with such a thing.

Humanity isn't just unworthy of your higher notions, they will reject them, with violence no less. They are the scorpion that would sooner sting you and drown than change their nature and peaceful embrace your hand attempting to save them from the rushing waters. You do not have to watch the trains collide, but you cannot stop them either. By their nature, that is what they do, it's just a matter of time.

I believe humanity is at its worst under capitalism, nothing is perfect, but let's be real now man...

 

[SwimExpert]

No, the state should not exist at all, and payment should be determined on what one gives to society, or more so: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" Yeah, marxist-leninist states failed, for the most part, much like exploited capitalist countries.

Should.

You keep using that word. Who is to say what "should" happen? You?

I have extremely high ability. "Should" I work extra hard to produce more than most?

 

[thereisnospoon]

Last fall, I became a barista in a small, “socially responsible” coffee company. A few months later, I got a temporary paralegal position at one of the world’s biggest multinational, corporate law firms.

The two companies had little in common, but both told me one thing: Don't talk to your coworkers about your pay.

At the law firm, this warning was conveyed to me during my salary negotiation. After I had worked for three months through a temp agency, the firm offered me a spot on their payroll. Given the size and success of the firm, the starting salary seemed low.

The HR manager tried to convince me that the offer was competitive. She told me that she couldn’t offer more because it would be unfair to other paralegals. She said that if we did not agree to a salary that day, then she would have to suspend me because I would be working past the allowed temp phase. I insisted that she look into a higher offer and she agreed that we could meet again later. Before I left, she had something to add.


“Make sure you don’t talk about your salary with anyone,” she said sweetly, as if she was giving advice to her own son. “It causes conflict and people can be let go for doing it.” (This is to the best of my recollection, not verbatim.)

It wasn’t all that surprising to hear this from a corporate HR manager. What was surprising was the déjà vu.

Just three months earlier, some of my coworkers at the coffee shop told me that our bosses, who worked in the office on salaries, and even the owner, got a higher cut of the tips than we did. One barista told me that when she complained about it, the managers reduced her hours.

When you make minimum wage and have to fight for more than 30 hours per week, tips are pretty important, so I sat down with my managers to discuss the controversy. That’s when they told me not to talk about it with the other baristas. The owner “hates it when people talk about money,” my manager added, and “would fire people for it if he could.” I sulked back to the espresso machine, making my lattes at half speed and failing to do side work.

In both workplaces, my bosses were breaking the law.

Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), all workers have the right to engage “concerted activity for mutual aid or protection” and “organize a union to negotiate with [their] employer concerning [their] wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment.” In six states, including my home state of Illinois, the law even more explicitly protects the rights of workers to discuss their pay.

This is true whether the employers make their threats verbally or on paper and whether the consequences are firing or merely some sort of cold shoulder from management. My managers at the coffee shop seemed to understand that they weren't allowed to fire me solely for talking about pay, but they may not have known that it is also illegal to discourage employees from discussing their pay with each other. As NYU law professor Cynthia Estlund explained to NPR, the law "means that you and your co-workers get to talk together about things that matter to you at work." Even "a nudge from the boss saying 'we don't do that around here' ... is also unlawful under the National Labor Relations Act," Estlund added.

And yet, gag rules thrive in workplaces across the country. In a report updated this year, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that about half of American employees in all sectors are either explicitly prohibited or strongly discouraged from discussing pay with their coworkers. In the private sector, the number is higher, at 61 percent.

This is why President Obama recently signed two executive actions addressing workplace transparency and accountability. One prohibits federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their pay with one another. The other requires contractors to provide compensation data on their employees, including race and sex. But while these actions protect workers at federally contracted employers, they do not affect others.


The bill that would cover the rest of workers is the Paycheck Fairness Act. The law would both strengthen penalties to employers who retaliate against workers for discussing pay and require employers to provide a justification for wage differentials.

These reforms are necessary to address this widespread, illegal problem that the law has failed to address for decades. Gag rules violate a fundamental labor right and allow for discriminatory pay schemes.

“remedies” are slaps on the wrist: reinstatement for wrongful termination, back-pay, and/or “informational remedies” such as “the posting of a notice by the employer promising to not violate the law.”

At the same time, ignorance of the law can just as easily fuel gag rules. Craig Becker, general counsel for the AFL-CIO, used to serve on the National Labor Relations Board. He told me that workers who called the NLRB rarely were aware that their employer’s pay secrecy policy was unlawful.

“The problem isn’t so much that the remedies are inadequate,” Becker said, “but that so few workers know their rights.” He says that even among those workers who are aware of the NLRA, many think that it protects unions but no one else. Now overseeing organizers at the AFL-CIO, Becker has found that before organizers even begin helping workers, they have to educate employees on this very basic law. “Workers call us up saying they’re unhappy and they want to organize,” Becker explains, “and when organizers look at the employee manual, sure enough, they find a policy saying that workers aren’t allowed to discuss their pay.”

Gag rules, then, are policies that flourish when employers know the law and their employees do not.

But why do employers do this in the first place? Many employers say that if workers talk to each other about pay, then tension is sure to follow. It’s understandable: If you found out that your coworker made more than you for doing the same work, then you’d probably be upset.

A study by economists David Card, Enrico Moretti, and Emmanuel Saez from Berkeley and Alexandre Mas from Princeton supports that prediction. To study the relationship between pay transparency, turnover, and workplace satisfaction, they selected a group of employees in the University of California system and showed them a website that lists the salaries of all UC employees. They found that employees who were paid above the median were unaffected by using the website, while those who were paid lower than the median became less satisfied with their work and more likely to start job hunting. This result suggests, according to the authors, that employers have an incentive to keep pay under wraps.

The limitation of this research is that it doesn’t tell us much about whether those employees’ dissatisfaction was a bad thing. While it’s possible that those employees were getting a fair wage and just felt belittled by their comparative pay, it’s also possible that they were getting stiffed.

Lilly Ledbetter Act, which gives workers a longer period of time to file pay discrimination suits against their employer. Ledbetter was told that she would be fired if she talked about pay with her coworkers, but after nearly three decades of work with Goodyear, someone slipped her a note saying that she was underpaid.

Ledbetter’s case shows how pay secrecy can cause the pay gap between men and women, a gap that widens between men and women of color. More than 50 years after the Equal Pay Act, study after study show that women are still paid less than men for the same work. Some have argued that the pay gap is effectively a myth, attributing it to women’s career choices rather than workplace discrimination. If only that were true. As the National Women’s Law Center has repeatedly pointed out, this “ignores the fact that ‘women’s’ jobs often pay less precisely because women do them, because women’s work is devalued, and that women are paid less even when they work in the same occupations as men.” Even when you look at industries dominated by one sex or the other, the pay gap exists in both.


Ariane Hegewisch is the study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the author of several reports on pay secrecy and wage discrimination. One of the reasons she sees behind the pay gap is that, five decades after the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex, old-fashioned workplace beliefs still justify sexist pay distribution. For example, in one case, in which a group of women sued Walmart for sexist discrimination in pay and promotions, women testified that their managers said men “are working as the heads of their households, while women are just working for the sake of working,” even though women are now the sole or primary breadwinners in around 40 percent of American households.

Others have explained the pay gap by showing that women are less likely to ask for raises. True as this is, the solution isn’t as simple as telling women to speak up. Several experiments by Hannah Bowles of Harvard and Linda Babcock and Lei Lai of Carnegie Mellon University have shown that employers are more likely to penalize women than men for negotiating. This suggests that women bite their tongues to avoid being called “pushy” or “bossy,” words with particularly negative connotations for women.

We don’t know whether gag rules directly cause wage discrimination, but they undoubtedly open the door to it. Employers who keep pay secret are free to set pay scales on arbitrary bases or fail to give well-deserved raises because of social norms. "When you don't have transparency and accountability,” Hegewisch told me, “employers react to these pressures and biases and women tend to lose out."

Of course, one of the time-tested mechanisms of preventing wage discrimination, unionization, has been in steady decline for decades. Jake Rosenfeld, associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington, has studied unions and is now researching the relationship between pay secrecy and wage discrimination. He told me that although there is not enough data to draw a direct causal line between pay secrecy and unfair wages, we do know that in the public sector, where wage transparency is far more common, pay tends to be more equal and benefits are more evenly distributed.

But in both the public and the private sector, union decline has shifted the balance of power toward employers in a way that can allow employers to keep wages secret and pay their workers unfairly. “Removing a key source of collective power in the vast majority of workplaces opens up space for employers to institute new wage setting practices, and pay secrecy is one of them,” Rosenfeld says. “It’s much harder to keep the books closed when you have a union arguing left and right to open them up.”

Republican lawmakers have blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act three times,claiming that it would just increase lawsuits against employers. They’ve also argued that forcing firms to share their compensation practices would hurt business. But according to Hegewisch, there’s no evidence that lawsuits have increased in states where pay transparency laws have been strengthened, and firms already share compensation information through human resources services like WorldatWork.


If the law did change, we would still face one of the biggest barriers to pay transparency: workplace culture. Even the most confident among us can melt into awkward, self-conscious messes when we have to negotiate our salaries, and asking a coworker about pay seems akin to asking about their sex life. Privatecompanies are showing that opening up the books completely can work, while the public sector has done that for decades, yet many still fear that talking about pay would destroy our workplace collegiality.

On the day my bosses at the coffee shop told me not to talk tips, my morale hit bottom. An organization I once trusted was telling me not to ask basic questions about my compensation. Even if pay secrecy comes with good intentions, this is its unintended effect: It tells workers that their bosses have something to hide, or that they don’t have the right to get a second opinion on whether they are being treated fairly. As Craig Becker told me, “Workers can only improve their situation when they can understand their working conditions.” Deciding whether a pay scale is fair cannot be left up to the employer alone.

When the Boss Says Don t Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid - The Atlantic

Because it is none of anyone else's business?

 

[Marxist]

Last fall, I became a barista in a small, “socially responsible” coffee company. A few months later, I got a temporary paralegal position at one of the world’s biggest multinational, corporate law firms.

The two companies had little in common, but both told me one thing: Don't talk to your coworkers about your pay.

At the law firm, this warning was conveyed to me during my salary negotiation. After I had worked for three months through a temp agency, the firm offered me a spot on their payroll. Given the size and success of the firm, the starting salary seemed low.

The HR manager tried to convince me that the offer was competitive. She told me that she couldn’t offer more because it would be unfair to other paralegals. She said that if we did not agree to a salary that day, then she would have to suspend me because I would be working past the allowed temp phase. I insisted that she look into a higher offer and she agreed that we could meet again later. Before I left, she had something to add.


“Make sure you don’t talk about your salary with anyone,” she said sweetly, as if she was giving advice to her own son. “It causes conflict and people can be let go for doing it.” (This is to the best of my recollection, not verbatim.)

It wasn’t all that surprising to hear this from a corporate HR manager. What was surprising was the déjà vu.

Just three months earlier, some of my coworkers at the coffee shop told me that our bosses, who worked in the office on salaries, and even the owner, got a higher cut of the tips than we did. One barista told me that when she complained about it, the managers reduced her hours.

When you make minimum wage and have to fight for more than 30 hours per week, tips are pretty important, so I sat down with my managers to discuss the controversy. That’s when they told me not to talk about it with the other baristas. The owner “hates it when people talk about money,” my manager added, and “would fire people for it if he could.” I sulked back to the espresso machine, making my lattes at half speed and failing to do side work.

In both workplaces, my bosses were breaking the law.

Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), all workers have the right to engage “concerted activity for mutual aid or protection” and “organize a union to negotiate with [their] employer concerning [their] wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment.” In six states, including my home state of Illinois, the law even more explicitly protects the rights of workers to discuss their pay.

This is true whether the employers make their threats verbally or on paper and whether the consequences are firing or merely some sort of cold shoulder from management. My managers at the coffee shop seemed to understand that they weren't allowed to fire me solely for talking about pay, but they may not have known that it is also illegal to discourage employees from discussing their pay with each other. As NYU law professor Cynthia Estlund explained to NPR, the law "means that you and your co-workers get to talk together about things that matter to you at work." Even "a nudge from the boss saying 'we don't do that around here' ... is also unlawful under the National Labor Relations Act," Estlund added.

And yet, gag rules thrive in workplaces across the country. In a report updated this year, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that about half of American employees in all sectors are either explicitly prohibited or strongly discouraged from discussing pay with their coworkers. In the private sector, the number is higher, at 61 percent.

This is why President Obama recently signed two executive actions addressing workplace transparency and accountability. One prohibits federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their pay with one another. The other requires contractors to provide compensation data on their employees, including race and sex. But while these actions protect workers at federally contracted employers, they do not affect others.


The bill that would cover the rest of workers is the Paycheck Fairness Act. The law would both strengthen penalties to employers who retaliate against workers for discussing pay and require employers to provide a justification for wage differentials.

These reforms are necessary to address this widespread, illegal problem that the law has failed to address for decades. Gag rules violate a fundamental labor right and allow for discriminatory pay schemes.

“remedies” are slaps on the wrist: reinstatement for wrongful termination, back-pay, and/or “informational remedies” such as “the posting of a notice by the employer promising to not violate the law.”

At the same time, ignorance of the law can just as easily fuel gag rules. Craig Becker, general counsel for the AFL-CIO, used to serve on the National Labor Relations Board. He told me that workers who called the NLRB rarely were aware that their employer’s pay secrecy policy was unlawful.

“The problem isn’t so much that the remedies are inadequate,” Becker said, “but that so few workers know their rights.” He says that even among those workers who are aware of the NLRA, many think that it protects unions but no one else. Now overseeing organizers at the AFL-CIO, Becker has found that before organizers even begin helping workers, they have to educate employees on this very basic law. “Workers call us up saying they’re unhappy and they want to organize,” Becker explains, “and when organizers look at the employee manual, sure enough, they find a policy saying that workers aren’t allowed to discuss their pay.”

Gag rules, then, are policies that flourish when employers know the law and their employees do not.

But why do employers do this in the first place? Many employers say that if workers talk to each other about pay, then tension is sure to follow. It’s understandable: If you found out that your coworker made more than you for doing the same work, then you’d probably be upset.

A study by economists David Card, Enrico Moretti, and Emmanuel Saez from Berkeley and Alexandre Mas from Princeton supports that prediction. To study the relationship between pay transparency, turnover, and workplace satisfaction, they selected a group of employees in the University of California system and showed them a website that lists the salaries of all UC employees. They found that employees who were paid above the median were unaffected by using the website, while those who were paid lower than the median became less satisfied with their work and more likely to start job hunting. This result suggests, according to the authors, that employers have an incentive to keep pay under wraps.

The limitation of this research is that it doesn’t tell us much about whether those employees’ dissatisfaction was a bad thing. While it’s possible that those employees were getting a fair wage and just felt belittled by their comparative pay, it’s also possible that they were getting stiffed.

Lilly Ledbetter Act, which gives workers a longer period of time to file pay discrimination suits against their employer. Ledbetter was told that she would be fired if she talked about pay with her coworkers, but after nearly three decades of work with Goodyear, someone slipped her a note saying that she was underpaid.

Ledbetter’s case shows how pay secrecy can cause the pay gap between men and women, a gap that widens between men and women of color. More than 50 years after the Equal Pay Act, study after study show that women are still paid less than men for the same work. Some have argued that the pay gap is effectively a myth, attributing it to women’s career choices rather than workplace discrimination. If only that were true. As the National Women’s Law Center has repeatedly pointed out, this “ignores the fact that ‘women’s’ jobs often pay less precisely because women do them, because women’s work is devalued, and that women are paid less even when they work in the same occupations as men.” Even when you look at industries dominated by one sex or the other, the pay gap exists in both.


Ariane Hegewisch is the study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the author of several reports on pay secrecy and wage discrimination. One of the reasons she sees behind the pay gap is that, five decades after the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex, old-fashioned workplace beliefs still justify sexist pay distribution. For example, in one case, in which a group of women sued Walmart for sexist discrimination in pay and promotions, women testified that their managers said men “are working as the heads of their households, while women are just working for the sake of working,” even though women are now the sole or primary breadwinners in around 40 percent of American households.

Others have explained the pay gap by showing that women are less likely to ask for raises. True as this is, the solution isn’t as simple as telling women to speak up. Several experiments by Hannah Bowles of Harvard and Linda Babcock and Lei Lai of Carnegie Mellon University have shown that employers are more likely to penalize women than men for negotiating. This suggests that women bite their tongues to avoid being called “pushy” or “bossy,” words with particularly negative connotations for women.

We don’t know whether gag rules directly cause wage discrimination, but they undoubtedly open the door to it. Employers who keep pay secret are free to set pay scales on arbitrary bases or fail to give well-deserved raises because of social norms. "When you don't have transparency and accountability,” Hegewisch told me, “employers react to these pressures and biases and women tend to lose out."

Of course, one of the time-tested mechanisms of preventing wage discrimination, unionization, has been in steady decline for decades. Jake Rosenfeld, associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington, has studied unions and is now researching the relationship between pay secrecy and wage discrimination. He told me that although there is not enough data to draw a direct causal line between pay secrecy and unfair wages, we do know that in the public sector, where wage transparency is far more common, pay tends to be more equal and benefits are more evenly distributed.

But in both the public and the private sector, union decline has shifted the balance of power toward employers in a way that can allow employers to keep wages secret and pay their workers unfairly. “Removing a key source of collective power in the vast majority of workplaces opens up space for employers to institute new wage setting practices, and pay secrecy is one of them,” Rosenfeld says. “It’s much harder to keep the books closed when you have a union arguing left and right to open them up.”

Republican lawmakers have blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act three times,claiming that it would just increase lawsuits against employers. They’ve also argued that forcing firms to share their compensation practices would hurt business. But according to Hegewisch, there’s no evidence that lawsuits have increased in states where pay transparency laws have been strengthened, and firms already share compensation information through human resources services like WorldatWork.


If the law did change, we would still face one of the biggest barriers to pay transparency: workplace culture. Even the most confident among us can melt into awkward, self-conscious messes when we have to negotiate our salaries, and asking a coworker about pay seems akin to asking about their sex life. Privatecompanies are showing that opening up the books completely can work, while the public sector has done that for decades, yet many still fear that talking about pay would destroy our workplace collegiality.

On the day my bosses at the coffee shop told me not to talk tips, my morale hit bottom. An organization I once trusted was telling me not to ask basic questions about my compensation. Even if pay secrecy comes with good intentions, this is its unintended effect: It tells workers that their bosses have something to hide, or that they don’t have the right to get a second opinion on whether they are being treated fairly. As Craig Becker told me, “Workers can only improve their situation when they can understand their working conditions.” Deciding whether a pay scale is fair cannot be left up to the employer alone.

When the Boss Says Don t Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid - The Atlantic

Because it is none of anyone else's business?

Read the article and get back to me.

 

[Marxist]

No, the state should not exist at all, and payment should be determined on what one gives to society, or more so: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" Yeah, marxist-leninist states failed, for the most part, much like exploited capitalist countries.

Should.

You keep using that word. Who is to say what "should" happen? You?

I have extremely high ability. "Should" I work extra hard to produce more than most?

It's my opinion, yes, I don't know, what do you produce? Food? Or excel spreadsheet data?

 

[Indofred]

Ukrainian free territory

Free ... if you weren't one of the many people they murdered.

 

[SwimExpert]

Assumptions based on your own bullshit rhetoric to support your idea of not wanting workers to organize

Speaking of assumptions, where did I ever say that I don't want workers to organize? Nowhere. As it turns out, I am a strong proponent of people's right to form unions. My only stipulation is that membership must be non-compulsory.

it's obvious you want that. (See, I can spew bullshit to.)

No, it's not. In any event, you keep getting upset about me saying you're young and inexperienced. It can only mean I'm correct. So how old are you?

 

[Marxist]

Ukrainian free territory

Free ... if you weren't one of the many people they murdered.

Do you know anything about the Ukrainian free territory? Idiot.

 

[Marxist]

Assumptions based on your own bullshit rhetoric to support your idea of not wanting workers to organize

Speaking of assumptions, where did I ever say that I don't want workers to organize? Nowhere. As it turns out, I am a strong proponent of people's right to form unions. My only stipulation is that membership must be non-compulsory.

it's obvious you want that. (See, I can spew bullshit to.)

No, it's not. In any event, you keep getting upset about me saying you're young and inexperienced. It can only mean I'm correct. So how old are you?

It's a joke to show that your assumptions are idiotic, it's why I put the () at the end .-.
I don't know, it's not professionalism to spread my age

 

[occupied]

I never tell my coworkers how much I get paid. Because I almost always get paid more than they who have equal/comparable experience and tenure. Sometimes I get paid more than people who have higher positions than myself.

Aside from that, a true professional does not discuss these matters with coworkers. It does not matter how much I get paid. Your pay is your problem. If you think you are worth more money, then you need to make your case.

One thing that is evident from the story in the OP, the job seeker lacked negotiation skills.

It's not about "a true professional" pfft, shouldn't workers who WORK together want to discuss what the capitalist is paying them?

Most workers are not professionals, they are easily replaceable drones who put up with massive amounts of bullshit because they are nothing but faceless cogs and management reminds them every day of that fact. I never have worked for a big company because of just how coldly impersonal the employment relationship is when you have never laid eyes on the man who signs your paycheck.

It's disturbing. Workers need to take over production, work together, care for each other..

It's just how humans are wired, we cannot conceive a system where there is no ruling hierarchy, no big boss controlling everything. It's why Socialism/Marxism devolves into everything it claims to hate. Our reptilian mid-brain demands a clear leader but leaders usually place themselves above the rabble and serve their own interests, something Marxism aims for but can never truly achieve on a large scale.

We already have, we have accomplished it, and if we can't, we already have the concept of no state that has been achieved, the concept of direct democracy, it doesn't devolve, the examples I've given that worked were violently overthrown, look what happened to those in the paris commune.

The Free Territory (Ukrainian: Вільна територіяvilna terytoriya; Russian: свободная территорияsvobodnaya territoriya) or Makhnovia (МахновщинаMakhnovshchyna) was an attempt to form a statelessanarchist[1] society during the Ukrainian Revolution. It existed from 1918 to 1921, during which time "free soviets" and libertariancommunes[2] operated under the protection of Nestor Makhno's Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army. The population of the area was around seven million.[3]

7 Million during a revolution, and the bolsheviks fighting against the anarchists, and they succeeded,

I used to be just like you but had to temper my revolutionary zeal with the hard fact that people live how they want to live and they want to live under presidents, kings, warlords and generalissimos. It really makes no sense that people willingly give away so much personal responsibility to these self serving sociopaths but they do.

 

[SwimExpert]

It's my opinion, yes, I don't know, what do you produce? Food? Or excel spreadsheet data?

What does it matter what I produce? I produce work that yields goods and services that are needed by the public, in a cost effective manner. I am very good at my job. I am better than most. I accomplish more than most.

So please, answer my question. "Should" I produce more than others, without regard to what I am compensated?

 

[Marxist]

It's not about "a true professional" pfft, shouldn't workers who WORK together want to discuss what the capitalist is paying them?

Most workers are not professionals, they are easily replaceable drones who put up with massive amounts of bullshit because they are nothing but faceless cogs and management reminds them every day of that fact. I never have worked for a big company because of just how coldly impersonal the employment relationship is when you have never laid eyes on the man who signs your paycheck.

It's disturbing. Workers need to take over production, work together, care for each other..

It's just how humans are wired, we cannot conceive a system where there is no ruling hierarchy, no big boss controlling everything. It's why Socialism/Marxism devolves into everything it claims to hate. Our reptilian mid-brain demands a clear leader but leaders usually place themselves above the rabble and serve their own interests, something Marxism aims for but can never truly achieve on a large scale.

We already have, we have accomplished it, and if we can't, we already have the concept of no state that has been achieved, the concept of direct democracy, it doesn't devolve, the examples I've given that worked were violently overthrown, look what happened to those in the paris commune.

The Free Territory (Ukrainian: Вільна територіяvilna terytoriya; Russian: свободная территорияsvobodnaya territoriya) or Makhnovia (МахновщинаMakhnovshchyna) was an attempt to form a statelessanarchist[1] society during the Ukrainian Revolution. It existed from 1918 to 1921, during which time "free soviets" and libertariancommunes[2] operated under the protection of Nestor Makhno's Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army. The population of the area was around seven million.[3]

7 Million during a revolution, and the bolsheviks fighting against the anarchists, and they succeeded,

I used to be just like you but had to temper my revolutionary zeal with the hard fact that people live how they want to live and they want to live under presidents, kings, warlords and generalissimos. It really makes no sense that people willingly give away so much personal responsibility to these self serving sociopaths but they do.

They didn't in the paris commune, the free ukraine, etc, etc, etc... It takes education to make people realize it's possible.

 

[Marxist]

It's my opinion, yes, I don't know, what do you produce? Food? Or excel spreadsheet data?

What does it matter what I produce? I produce work that yields goods and services that are needed by the public, in a cost effective manner. I am very good at my job. I am better than most. I accomplish more than most.

So please, answer my question. "Should" I produce more than others, without regard to what I am compensated?

It does matter, if you produce food, you're amount of production is obviously important. I don't know, that's why the core idea of anarchism/communism is to pay laborers based on what they produce/the labor they give, or help them when they can't work. I'm sure you're better then most, (Yeah, ok) let's assume billions, as you use "most"

 

[SwimExpert]

I don't know, it's not professionalism to spread my age

Okay, so you admit you are young.

Not sure why you are so angsty, other than the fact that being angsty is just a part of youth.

 

[thereisnospoon]

Last fall, I became a barista in a small, “socially responsible” coffee company. A few months later, I got a temporary paralegal position at one of the world’s biggest multinational, corporate law firms.

The two companies had little in common, but both told me one thing: Don't talk to your coworkers about your pay.

At the law firm, this warning was conveyed to me during my salary negotiation. After I had worked for three months through a temp agency, the firm offered me a spot on their payroll. Given the size and success of the firm, the starting salary seemed low.

The HR manager tried to convince me that the offer was competitive. She told me that she couldn’t offer more because it would be unfair to other paralegals. She said that if we did not agree to a salary that day, then she would have to suspend me because I would be working past the allowed temp phase. I insisted that she look into a higher offer and she agreed that we could meet again later. Before I left, she had something to add.


“Make sure you don’t talk about your salary with anyone,” she said sweetly, as if she was giving advice to her own son. “It causes conflict and people can be let go for doing it.” (This is to the best of my recollection, not verbatim.)

It wasn’t all that surprising to hear this from a corporate HR manager. What was surprising was the déjà vu.

Just three months earlier, some of my coworkers at the coffee shop told me that our bosses, who worked in the office on salaries, and even the owner, got a higher cut of the tips than we did. One barista told me that when she complained about it, the managers reduced her hours.

When you make minimum wage and have to fight for more than 30 hours per week, tips are pretty important, so I sat down with my managers to discuss the controversy. That’s when they told me not to talk about it with the other baristas. The owner “hates it when people talk about money,” my manager added, and “would fire people for it if he could.” I sulked back to the espresso machine, making my lattes at half speed and failing to do side work.

In both workplaces, my bosses were breaking the law.

Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), all workers have the right to engage “concerted activity for mutual aid or protection” and “organize a union to negotiate with [their] employer concerning [their] wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment.” In six states, including my home state of Illinois, the law even more explicitly protects the rights of workers to discuss their pay.

This is true whether the employers make their threats verbally or on paper and whether the consequences are firing or merely some sort of cold shoulder from management. My managers at the coffee shop seemed to understand that they weren't allowed to fire me solely for talking about pay, but they may not have known that it is also illegal to discourage employees from discussing their pay with each other. As NYU law professor Cynthia Estlund explained to NPR, the law "means that you and your co-workers get to talk together about things that matter to you at work." Even "a nudge from the boss saying 'we don't do that around here' ... is also unlawful under the National Labor Relations Act," Estlund added.

And yet, gag rules thrive in workplaces across the country. In a report updated this year, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that about half of American employees in all sectors are either explicitly prohibited or strongly discouraged from discussing pay with their coworkers. In the private sector, the number is higher, at 61 percent.

This is why President Obama recently signed two executive actions addressing workplace transparency and accountability. One prohibits federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their pay with one another. The other requires contractors to provide compensation data on their employees, including race and sex. But while these actions protect workers at federally contracted employers, they do not affect others.


The bill that would cover the rest of workers is the Paycheck Fairness Act. The law would both strengthen penalties to employers who retaliate against workers for discussing pay and require employers to provide a justification for wage differentials.

These reforms are necessary to address this widespread, illegal problem that the law has failed to address for decades. Gag rules violate a fundamental labor right and allow for discriminatory pay schemes.

“remedies” are slaps on the wrist: reinstatement for wrongful termination, back-pay, and/or “informational remedies” such as “the posting of a notice by the employer promising to not violate the law.”

At the same time, ignorance of the law can just as easily fuel gag rules. Craig Becker, general counsel for the AFL-CIO, used to serve on the National Labor Relations Board. He told me that workers who called the NLRB rarely were aware that their employer’s pay secrecy policy was unlawful.

“The problem isn’t so much that the remedies are inadequate,” Becker said, “but that so few workers know their rights.” He says that even among those workers who are aware of the NLRA, many think that it protects unions but no one else. Now overseeing organizers at the AFL-CIO, Becker has found that before organizers even begin helping workers, they have to educate employees on this very basic law. “Workers call us up saying they’re unhappy and they want to organize,” Becker explains, “and when organizers look at the employee manual, sure enough, they find a policy saying that workers aren’t allowed to discuss their pay.”

Gag rules, then, are policies that flourish when employers know the law and their employees do not.

But why do employers do this in the first place? Many employers say that if workers talk to each other about pay, then tension is sure to follow. It’s understandable: If you found out that your coworker made more than you for doing the same work, then you’d probably be upset.

A study by economists David Card, Enrico Moretti, and Emmanuel Saez from Berkeley and Alexandre Mas from Princeton supports that prediction. To study the relationship between pay transparency, turnover, and workplace satisfaction, they selected a group of employees in the University of California system and showed them a website that lists the salaries of all UC employees. They found that employees who were paid above the median were unaffected by using the website, while those who were paid lower than the median became less satisfied with their work and more likely to start job hunting. This result suggests, according to the authors, that employers have an incentive to keep pay under wraps.

The limitation of this research is that it doesn’t tell us much about whether those employees’ dissatisfaction was a bad thing. While it’s possible that those employees were getting a fair wage and just felt belittled by their comparative pay, it’s also possible that they were getting stiffed.

Lilly Ledbetter Act, which gives workers a longer period of time to file pay discrimination suits against their employer. Ledbetter was told that she would be fired if she talked about pay with her coworkers, but after nearly three decades of work with Goodyear, someone slipped her a note saying that she was underpaid.

Ledbetter’s case shows how pay secrecy can cause the pay gap between men and women, a gap that widens between men and women of color. More than 50 years after the Equal Pay Act, study after study show that women are still paid less than men for the same work. Some have argued that the pay gap is effectively a myth, attributing it to women’s career choices rather than workplace discrimination. If only that were true. As the National Women’s Law Center has repeatedly pointed out, this “ignores the fact that ‘women’s’ jobs often pay less precisely because women do them, because women’s work is devalued, and that women are paid less even when they work in the same occupations as men.” Even when you look at industries dominated by one sex or the other, the pay gap exists in both.


Ariane Hegewisch is the study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the author of several reports on pay secrecy and wage discrimination. One of the reasons she sees behind the pay gap is that, five decades after the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex, old-fashioned workplace beliefs still justify sexist pay distribution. For example, in one case, in which a group of women sued Walmart for sexist discrimination in pay and promotions, women testified that their managers said men “are working as the heads of their households, while women are just working for the sake of working,” even though women are now the sole or primary breadwinners in around 40 percent of American households.

Others have explained the pay gap by showing that women are less likely to ask for raises. True as this is, the solution isn’t as simple as telling women to speak up. Several experiments by Hannah Bowles of Harvard and Linda Babcock and Lei Lai of Carnegie Mellon University have shown that employers are more likely to penalize women than men for negotiating. This suggests that women bite their tongues to avoid being called “pushy” or “bossy,” words with particularly negative connotations for women.

We don’t know whether gag rules directly cause wage discrimination, but they undoubtedly open the door to it. Employers who keep pay secret are free to set pay scales on arbitrary bases or fail to give well-deserved raises because of social norms. "When you don't have transparency and accountability,” Hegewisch told me, “employers react to these pressures and biases and women tend to lose out."

Of course, one of the time-tested mechanisms of preventing wage discrimination, unionization, has been in steady decline for decades. Jake Rosenfeld, associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington, has studied unions and is now researching the relationship between pay secrecy and wage discrimination. He told me that although there is not enough data to draw a direct causal line between pay secrecy and unfair wages, we do know that in the public sector, where wage transparency is far more common, pay tends to be more equal and benefits are more evenly distributed.

But in both the public and the private sector, union decline has shifted the balance of power toward employers in a way that can allow employers to keep wages secret and pay their workers unfairly. “Removing a key source of collective power in the vast majority of workplaces opens up space for employers to institute new wage setting practices, and pay secrecy is one of them,” Rosenfeld says. “It’s much harder to keep the books closed when you have a union arguing left and right to open them up.”

Republican lawmakers have blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act three times,claiming that it would just increase lawsuits against employers. They’ve also argued that forcing firms to share their compensation practices would hurt business. But according to Hegewisch, there’s no evidence that lawsuits have increased in states where pay transparency laws have been strengthened, and firms already share compensation information through human resources services like WorldatWork.


If the law did change, we would still face one of the biggest barriers to pay transparency: workplace culture. Even the most confident among us can melt into awkward, self-conscious messes when we have to negotiate our salaries, and asking a coworker about pay seems akin to asking about their sex life. Privatecompanies are showing that opening up the books completely can work, while the public sector has done that for decades, yet many still fear that talking about pay would destroy our workplace collegiality.

On the day my bosses at the coffee shop told me not to talk tips, my morale hit bottom. An organization I once trusted was telling me not to ask basic questions about my compensation. Even if pay secrecy comes with good intentions, this is its unintended effect: It tells workers that their bosses have something to hide, or that they don’t have the right to get a second opinion on whether they are being treated fairly. As Craig Becker told me, “Workers can only improve their situation when they can understand their working conditions.” Deciding whether a pay scale is fair cannot be left up to the employer alone.

When the Boss Says Don t Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid - The Atlantic

A law that means nothing. It is ancient. And contributes to back biting, office politics and low morale..
Lily Ledbetter will NEVER pass. Its a "lawyer law"...The intent of Lily Ledbetter is to fill the coffers of attorneys that specialize in labor complaints. It serves no other purpose.
It also flips due process on its head.
The 5th and 6th Amendments were added to the Constitution to stop government and individuals from having to prove a negative. Ledbetter would place the burden of proof on the defendant making it unconstitutional. And unenforceable. Forget it.
Businesses are well within their rights to place rules upon their employees that bar them from discussion their own pay with other employees.
Every place I have worked had similar policies.
Paycheck Fairness has ZERO chance of becoming law. For this is another piece of legislation that does nothing but create work for plaintiff's attorneys.

 

[Marxist]

I don't know, it's not professionalism to spread my age

Okay, so you admit you are young.

Not sure why you are so angsty, other than the fact that being angsty is just a part of youth.

Yeah, that's totally what I've done, I know your 76 years old and have erectile dysfunction, prove me wrong. See your stupidity?

 

[thereisnospoon]

If your boss tells you not to tell your coworkers how much you get paid then that means one of 2 things. Either you don't deserve that pay or your boss doesn't want your coworkers to know how incompetent he thinks they are.

I'd advise reading the article.

Why? Because you wish it?
I read it....It's a bunch of leftist propaganda crap.

 

[Marxist]

Last fall, I became a barista in a small, “socially responsible” coffee company. A few months later, I got a temporary paralegal position at one of the world’s biggest multinational, corporate law firms.

The two companies had little in common, but both told me one thing: Don't talk to your coworkers about your pay.

At the law firm, this warning was conveyed to me during my salary negotiation. After I had worked for three months through a temp agency, the firm offered me a spot on their payroll. Given the size and success of the firm, the starting salary seemed low.

The HR manager tried to convince me that the offer was competitive. She told me that she couldn’t offer more because it would be unfair to other paralegals. She said that if we did not agree to a salary that day, then she would have to suspend me because I would be working past the allowed temp phase. I insisted that she look into a higher offer and she agreed that we could meet again later. Before I left, she had something to add.


“Make sure you don’t talk about your salary with anyone,” she said sweetly, as if she was giving advice to her own son. “It causes conflict and people can be let go for doing it.” (This is to the best of my recollection, not verbatim.)

It wasn’t all that surprising to hear this from a corporate HR manager. What was surprising was the déjà vu.

Just three months earlier, some of my coworkers at the coffee shop told me that our bosses, who worked in the office on salaries, and even the owner, got a higher cut of the tips than we did. One barista told me that when she complained about it, the managers reduced her hours.

When you make minimum wage and have to fight for more than 30 hours per week, tips are pretty important, so I sat down with my managers to discuss the controversy. That’s when they told me not to talk about it with the other baristas. The owner “hates it when people talk about money,” my manager added, and “would fire people for it if he could.” I sulked back to the espresso machine, making my lattes at half speed and failing to do side work.

In both workplaces, my bosses were breaking the law.

Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), all workers have the right to engage “concerted activity for mutual aid or protection” and “organize a union to negotiate with [their] employer concerning [their] wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment.” In six states, including my home state of Illinois, the law even more explicitly protects the rights of workers to discuss their pay.

This is true whether the employers make their threats verbally or on paper and whether the consequences are firing or merely some sort of cold shoulder from management. My managers at the coffee shop seemed to understand that they weren't allowed to fire me solely for talking about pay, but they may not have known that it is also illegal to discourage employees from discussing their pay with each other. As NYU law professor Cynthia Estlund explained to NPR, the law "means that you and your co-workers get to talk together about things that matter to you at work." Even "a nudge from the boss saying 'we don't do that around here' ... is also unlawful under the National Labor Relations Act," Estlund added.

And yet, gag rules thrive in workplaces across the country. In a report updated this year, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that about half of American employees in all sectors are either explicitly prohibited or strongly discouraged from discussing pay with their coworkers. In the private sector, the number is higher, at 61 percent.

This is why President Obama recently signed two executive actions addressing workplace transparency and accountability. One prohibits federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their pay with one another. The other requires contractors to provide compensation data on their employees, including race and sex. But while these actions protect workers at federally contracted employers, they do not affect others.


The bill that would cover the rest of workers is the Paycheck Fairness Act. The law would both strengthen penalties to employers who retaliate against workers for discussing pay and require employers to provide a justification for wage differentials.

These reforms are necessary to address this widespread, illegal problem that the law has failed to address for decades. Gag rules violate a fundamental labor right and allow for discriminatory pay schemes.

“remedies” are slaps on the wrist: reinstatement for wrongful termination, back-pay, and/or “informational remedies” such as “the posting of a notice by the employer promising to not violate the law.”

At the same time, ignorance of the law can just as easily fuel gag rules. Craig Becker, general counsel for the AFL-CIO, used to serve on the National Labor Relations Board. He told me that workers who called the NLRB rarely were aware that their employer’s pay secrecy policy was unlawful.

“The problem isn’t so much that the remedies are inadequate,” Becker said, “but that so few workers know their rights.” He says that even among those workers who are aware of the NLRA, many think that it protects unions but no one else. Now overseeing organizers at the AFL-CIO, Becker has found that before organizers even begin helping workers, they have to educate employees on this very basic law. “Workers call us up saying they’re unhappy and they want to organize,” Becker explains, “and when organizers look at the employee manual, sure enough, they find a policy saying that workers aren’t allowed to discuss their pay.”

Gag rules, then, are policies that flourish when employers know the law and their employees do not.

But why do employers do this in the first place? Many employers say that if workers talk to each other about pay, then tension is sure to follow. It’s understandable: If you found out that your coworker made more than you for doing the same work, then you’d probably be upset.

A study by economists David Card, Enrico Moretti, and Emmanuel Saez from Berkeley and Alexandre Mas from Princeton supports that prediction. To study the relationship between pay transparency, turnover, and workplace satisfaction, they selected a group of employees in the University of California system and showed them a website that lists the salaries of all UC employees. They found that employees who were paid above the median were unaffected by using the website, while those who were paid lower than the median became less satisfied with their work and more likely to start job hunting. This result suggests, according to the authors, that employers have an incentive to keep pay under wraps.

The limitation of this research is that it doesn’t tell us much about whether those employees’ dissatisfaction was a bad thing. While it’s possible that those employees were getting a fair wage and just felt belittled by their comparative pay, it’s also possible that they were getting stiffed.

Lilly Ledbetter Act, which gives workers a longer period of time to file pay discrimination suits against their employer. Ledbetter was told that she would be fired if she talked about pay with her coworkers, but after nearly three decades of work with Goodyear, someone slipped her a note saying that she was underpaid.

Ledbetter’s case shows how pay secrecy can cause the pay gap between men and women, a gap that widens between men and women of color. More than 50 years after the Equal Pay Act, study after study show that women are still paid less than men for the same work. Some have argued that the pay gap is effectively a myth, attributing it to women’s career choices rather than workplace discrimination. If only that were true. As the National Women’s Law Center has repeatedly pointed out, this “ignores the fact that ‘women’s’ jobs often pay less precisely because women do them, because women’s work is devalued, and that women are paid less even when they work in the same occupations as men.” Even when you look at industries dominated by one sex or the other, the pay gap exists in both.


Ariane Hegewisch is the study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the author of several reports on pay secrecy and wage discrimination. One of the reasons she sees behind the pay gap is that, five decades after the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex, old-fashioned workplace beliefs still justify sexist pay distribution. For example, in one case, in which a group of women sued Walmart for sexist discrimination in pay and promotions, women testified that their managers said men “are working as the heads of their households, while women are just working for the sake of working,” even though women are now the sole or primary breadwinners in around 40 percent of American households.

Others have explained the pay gap by showing that women are less likely to ask for raises. True as this is, the solution isn’t as simple as telling women to speak up. Several experiments by Hannah Bowles of Harvard and Linda Babcock and Lei Lai of Carnegie Mellon University have shown that employers are more likely to penalize women than men for negotiating. This suggests that women bite their tongues to avoid being called “pushy” or “bossy,” words with particularly negative connotations for women.

We don’t know whether gag rules directly cause wage discrimination, but they undoubtedly open the door to it. Employers who keep pay secret are free to set pay scales on arbitrary bases or fail to give well-deserved raises because of social norms. "When you don't have transparency and accountability,” Hegewisch told me, “employers react to these pressures and biases and women tend to lose out."

Of course, one of the time-tested mechanisms of preventing wage discrimination, unionization, has been in steady decline for decades. Jake Rosenfeld, associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington, has studied unions and is now researching the relationship between pay secrecy and wage discrimination. He told me that although there is not enough data to draw a direct causal line between pay secrecy and unfair wages, we do know that in the public sector, where wage transparency is far more common, pay tends to be more equal and benefits are more evenly distributed.

But in both the public and the private sector, union decline has shifted the balance of power toward employers in a way that can allow employers to keep wages secret and pay their workers unfairly. “Removing a key source of collective power in the vast majority of workplaces opens up space for employers to institute new wage setting practices, and pay secrecy is one of them,” Rosenfeld says. “It’s much harder to keep the books closed when you have a union arguing left and right to open them up.”

Republican lawmakers have blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act three times,claiming that it would just increase lawsuits against employers. They’ve also argued that forcing firms to share their compensation practices would hurt business. But according to Hegewisch, there’s no evidence that lawsuits have increased in states where pay transparency laws have been strengthened, and firms already share compensation information through human resources services like WorldatWork.


If the law did change, we would still face one of the biggest barriers to pay transparency: workplace culture. Even the most confident among us can melt into awkward, self-conscious messes when we have to negotiate our salaries, and asking a coworker about pay seems akin to asking about their sex life. Privatecompanies are showing that opening up the books completely can work, while the public sector has done that for decades, yet many still fear that talking about pay would destroy our workplace collegiality.

On the day my bosses at the coffee shop told me not to talk tips, my morale hit bottom. An organization I once trusted was telling me not to ask basic questions about my compensation. Even if pay secrecy comes with good intentions, this is its unintended effect: It tells workers that their bosses have something to hide, or that they don’t have the right to get a second opinion on whether they are being treated fairly. As Craig Becker told me, “Workers can only improve their situation when they can understand their working conditions.” Deciding whether a pay scale is fair cannot be left up to the employer alone.

When the Boss Says Don t Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid - The Atlantic

A law that means nothing. It is ancient. And contributes to back biting, office politics and low morale..
Lily Ledbetter will NEVER pass. Its a "lawyer law"...The intent of Lily Ledbetter is to fill the coffers of attorneys that specialize in labor complaints. It serves no other purpose.
It also flips due process on its head.
The 5th and 6th Amendments were added to the Constitution to stop government and individuals from having to prove a negative. Ledbetter would place the burden of proof on the defendant making it unconstitutional. And unenforceable. Forget it.
Businesses are well within their rights to place rules upon their employees that bar them from discussion their own pay with other employees.
Every place I have worked had similar policies.
Paycheck Fairness has ZERO chance of becoming law. For this is another piece of legislation that does nothing but create work for plaintiff's attorneys.

Businesses are well within their rights to place rules upon their employees that bar them from discussion their own pay with other employees.

That's all I needed to hear.

 

[Marxist]

If your boss tells you not to tell your coworkers how much you get paid then that means one of 2 things. Either you don't deserve that pay or your boss doesn't want your coworkers to know how incompetent he thinks they are.

I'd advise reading the article.

Why? Because you wish it?
I read it....It's a bunch of leftist propaganda crap.

Yeah, ok, keep telling yourself that.

 

[thereisnospoon]

You can't exploit the workers, if they start working together.

Sounds like socialism
Tell me friend, are you a socialist?

No more than anything else that works.

If you're trying to say socialism/anarchism/etc doesn't work, please, refer to my signature, and consider the paris commune, the Ukrainian free territories, the anarchist movements in spain..

Socialism....Puke.