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Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

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Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#21

People tend to think that income taxes lower your salary. While in practice employers know exactly for how little money (in hand) you are willing to work and in absence of income taxes would just pay this much less so that your money in hand is the same. As an employee you should fight for income taxes to be as high as possible since they are neutral for you and might fund useful things for all. When left in the pock…

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Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#22
post #8

I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies. I want to do the jump, but lack of courage, good ideas, sales skills and a very good salary still holding me back (open for suggestions). But if the very good salary would go away, the scales tip instantly.

What you describe is the reason the web site you posted it on exists.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#23
post #8

I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies. I want to do the jump, but lack of courage, good ideas, sales skills and a very good salary still holding me back (open for suggestions). But if the very good salary would go away, the scales tip instantly.

I've considered it myself; I don't want to make a business doing contract work again, because I did not enjoy that.

If I were to start my own business it would have to be a product. I have plenty of interesting projects that I work on in my free time, but I'm not sure any of them are monetizable, or at least not monetizable enough for a venture capitalist to throw money at me (especially since most of them do not involve AI). I could probably think of something that could be monetizable if I really tried but if I don't actually enjoy the work I'm doing on the side for fun then I'm probably not going to do a particularly good job on it.

Though even if I did have some brilliant project that I could sell, I have no idea how to go about finding VC investors. And even if I knew how to find these investors, I think I would ultimately be too afraid to actually commit to it.

Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on. Sometimes it depresses me to think about it, but hard to feel too sad for myself when I still have a high salary job that involves me staring at a computer screen all day.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#24

One (more) thing to opt out of: Freeze Your Data - The Work Number https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze As I understand it, payroll whores your salary out to Equifax*, who then pimps it to others * Yeah, that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

I worked for Equifax many moons ago. They had a problem with people taking jobs there that no one else wanted, solely to gain access to their systems and reset their own credit scores. And, for some reason, they couldn’t roll it back once found out. Great company.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#25
post #8

I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies. I want to do the jump, but lack of courage, good ideas, sales skills and a very good salary still holding me back (open for suggestions). But if the very good salary would go away, the scales tip instantly.

That was always the "winning game". Only problem is that's a lot of work. The more things change, the more they stay the same; if you want more money, work harder. People who don't want to work harder complain that other people make more money because they either don't understand or are in denial about the amount of work the people they envy put in.

Yes there are exceptions. No pointing out exceptions won't help you, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#26
post #3

I'm not seeing how this matters, they were already doing that - the market is a big auction to work out the overlap between lowest salary employees will work for and the highest salary employers will offer. In that process employees also use data to figure out the highest salary that will be offered. The thing forcing employers to pay the salary they do is that if they offer less someone else will gazump them for the…

This allows all sorts of normally illegal discrimination via ai pass through. Never hire pregnant women, sick people or employees over 30 again. Target for race and religion whatever you want. Basically everything that’s scary about chinas social credit score except private run with zero accountability.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#28

People tend to think that income taxes lower your salary. While in practice employers know exactly for how little money (in hand) you are willing to work and in absence of income taxes would just pay this much less so that your money in hand is the same. As an employee you should fight for income taxes to be as high as possible since they are neutral for you and might fund useful things for all. When left in the pock…

You're suggesting that 100% of the income tax burden is shifted from employees to employers. The incidence of taxation (which party bears the burden of the tax, irrespective of who 'pays' it) is widely studied. As it relates to payroll taxes (paid by the employer) and income taxes (paid by the employee) most research finds that employees bear most (but not all) of the burden. This is the opposite of your claim.

It's not shifted. It's just there. It was never on the employees. Employees don't have their own money to tax. Employees money is employers money. That's its source.

Employees get taxed when they spend money by being consumers. Sales taxes and VAT are their tax burden. But income taxes of the employees are the burden of the employer. It's employer who has to fork that money because otherwise he wouldn't be able to pay enough so that the employee agrees to work.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#29

People tend to think that income taxes lower your salary. While in practice employers know exactly for how little money (in hand) you are willing to work and in absence of income taxes would just pay this much less so that your money in hand is the same. As an employee you should fight for income taxes to be as high as possible since they are neutral for you and might fund useful things for all. When left in the pock…

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Just imagine what would happen if income taxes for employees were reduced to zero. If you think employees would have that much more money you don't think straight. Employers don't pay workers as much as they can. They pay them as little as they can and that mostly doesn't change with the tax rate.

That's all you need to know to understand the actual mechanics in presence of misleading labels. Nominally income tax (of employees) is just a tax on purchase of labor.

Another angle you could use to understand this is that reduction of income tax (for bottom 90% of earners) promotes employment. Why is that? Beacuse it makes the labor cheaper.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#30
post #13

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Social mobility in the USA is actually pretty abysmal compared to Social Democratic countries. It ranks at like 25ish worldwide. Generally if you are born to poverty in the US, you stay there.
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