Openness About Compensation

To hide how little some or all employees might be paid, a selfish employer might enforce a policy prohibiting open discussion about compensation between workers.  Not all employers are like this, but doing everything from directly discouraging openness about pay to firing people for bringing it up among themselves is a tactic one might hear of quite a bit.  For those who think there is some grand obligation to honor this, silence about their compensation is the norm, and it might not even dawn on them that they might not be paid as much as they deserve.  A seemingly common "justification" for this is that talking about the similarities or differences in pay between employees could stir up jealousy, though anger or shock is perhaps far more likely.  This policy only ensures one thing, after all.

There is no actual benefit to anyone except for employers who refuse to pay everyone the same for the same kind and amount of work or who do not pay people based on their merit as an individual worker.  It certainly does not benefit workers too naive or distracted to realize that they are being underpaid, and it might instill a false hope that effort, accomplishment, and sincerity alone will earn an employer's positive attention.  Yes, in some cases, being open about one's compensation might stir up some jealousy, but so what?  If someone is jealous over not being paid as much as someone else when they are avoidably incompetent, then they do not deserve to be paid more regardless of their feelings, and if workers are irate over not being paid equally when they are all competent and have the same roles, then anger is not an invalid reaction.

Even incompetent workers are workers, and they are people, and thus they deserve livable compensation as it is, but any merit-based pay differences beyond this are not some injustice.  It is thus not only not true that openness about pay is bound to trigger jealousy or that it follows that this would make such openness immoral, but there are moral reasons (at least on the Christian worldview) why suppressing openness about this matter is itself the injustice.  Structuring society in a way so that a significant portion of one's entire lifetime is spent trying to earn enough money to survive, possibly spend on conveniences or pleasures, and still hopefully have enough to save for retirement is no small thing, and the many people who have to orient their schedules and energy around work do not deserve to be in the dark about how well they are being paid for this.

People work for money.  In a very different sense than they usually seem to mean by the phrase, conservatives are right when they think that people in general do not want to work right now--almost no one would work or would want to professionally work if it was not for needing monetary resources to survive comfortably within modern society.  This is not selfishness on its own.  Unless a person is materialistic/consumeristic or acting in a predatory manner in order to gain more money for himself or herself, there is not anything about wanting money that makes someone greedy.  This is not true of employers who do not pay livable wages/salaries or who do not reward merit beyond this: if they have the resources to pay employees in accordance with both of these factors and do not, they are the ones who are irrational, selfish, arrogant, or apathetic (though some worker might be these things as well).

An employer like this will try to undeservedly profit off of others by not giving them what is called for by human rights (and conscience and cultural conditioning do not reveal what humans rights are) or by individual merit.  Pressuring or doing whatever he or she can to outright force employees to never share their compensation with other workers, once again, only benefits an employer/manager who gains from having access to earnings that might belong to those under them.  Openness about compensation is one way to fight this kind of exploitation.  It is not oppression of employers to practice this.  It does not even have to entail workers constantly talking about their pay!  What it does ensure is the heightened deterrence of underpayment and the liberation of workers at least from the misleading impression that they are all by necessity being paid equally for equal work and having their individual contributions rewarded.