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Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

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Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I submit the myprivacy.equifax.com validation it hangs at "Processing..." indefinitely. #AbolishCreditAgencies

Credit, bank checking (ChexSystems), and personal information aggregators like Lexis Nexis and Thomson Reuters Clear ought to be abolished or curbed indeed. I hate to bring trans politics into this. I'm sure that's the last thing anybody wants to hear about right now. However we are a class of people whose sexuality can be unfairly identified by these databases.

> I hate to bring trans politics into this. I'm sure that's the last thing anybody wants to hear about right now.

It bothers me sometimes if other people do that, it does not bother me at all if actual trans people want to talk about it. Thank you for sharing, that angle didn't occur to me.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#342
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In countries where unions exist for everyone on the building, everyone knows what everyone else is earning. Additionally, in most European countries we don't have a culture of hidding our salaries from each other.

There wasn't too much salary sharing when I worked in Germany, in fact, it was the usual "keep everyone in the dark" approach from HR.

Netherlands too, and Belgium as well, AFAIK.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#343

Meanwhile in Norway, every citizen can check the income, wealth, and taxes statements of other citizens and companies. https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/

Interesting to read about the Norway's system! I would guess that "If you search for anyone, they can see that you did" is pretty fair but can hinder one's curiosity for searching the information. Also interesting that public lists for media is no longer distributed. How have media outlets taken this? Here in Finland Tax office publishes lists of all over 100k earners to media and they are published as public lists o…

> Also interesting that public lists for media is no longer distributed. How have media outlets taken this?

Media is free to write about, and have searchable lists, for parts of the info. Typically something that is of "public interest", e.g the highest earners.

The rules behind this I believe is a bit vague. I read up on the legal text for this now, and it basically states that they can get access to the lists as long as they sign an agreement where they, among other things, need to promise not to publish the full list.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#345

Salary data should be public anyway. Let’s all share ours. I’m currently contracting for $95/hr. My most recent salary was $140k, my most recent contracts besides my current one were a flat rate $24k contract for up to 80 hours and a short term contract for $100/hr. (I obviously like my current contract quite a lot)

the issue really isn't that it shouldn't be public. The issue is this service allows your new company to request your history so they can see your past salary. So you lose 100% of your negotiating power if they know how much you made and you don't know their ceiling.

At the risk of sounding naive and unrealistic, one could say your negotiating power should be based on the value your abilities add to a company. If we'd all share our income, we might create a union type of construction from which we can deduce a fair price for our services.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#347

NOTE: It is possible to freeze access to your employment data here: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze That being said, it doesn't stop employers from continuing to hand Equifax your data on a gold platter, and therefore does nothing to protect you from the inevitable data breach that will result in Equifax being required to give everyone affected $0.36 or one year of free credit monitoring.

Or send them a CCPA data deletion request: https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/equifax.com. This will generate a request email. You can then change the wordings to indicate that you are interested in deleting your salary history data.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the creators of YourDigitalRights.org.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#348
Salaries are not a secret.

Ergo, as employees... Share your salaries.

Knowledge is power and if the only entities that have power from knowing salaries are your employers then you have no power.

And for people hiring, make hiring decisions that are defensible, equal, and would survive full transparency. Act as if every employee is already sharing salary info, for if they aren't today they will be soon.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#349

Does this website or any other similar ones show your performance, your rehire-ability or if you got fired from a previous job? (outside of what can be inferred from your compensation)

Not exactly. It says active or terminated (we switched payroll providers) on my few.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#350

Salary data should be public anyway. Let’s all share ours. I’m currently contracting for $95/hr. My most recent salary was $140k, my most recent contracts besides my current one were a flat rate $24k contract for up to 80 hours and a short term contract for $100/hr. (I obviously like my current contract quite a lot)

the issue really isn't that it shouldn't be public. The issue is this service allows your new company to request your history so they can see your past salary. So you lose 100% of your negotiating power if they know how much you made and you don't know their ceiling.

So let’s make all our comp public. Don’t let them have that negotiation advantage.
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