this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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In what countries is it custom to openly discuss salary? In Germany and most if not all countries I’ve been to professionally it is not the norm. This is of course bad for transparency/employees and good for employers.
Germany has a principle of equal treatment. The only way to ensure this is respected is to discuss wages. There is a legal precedent that makes it completely unambiguous that discussing wages is protected. It may be uncomfortable, but that's just social pressure, encouraged by companies.
https://www.hensche.de/Rechtsanwalt_Arbeitsrecht_Urteile_AGB_LAG_Mecklenburg-Vorpommern_2Sa237-09.html
Not denying that it’s legal and beneficial to discuss that. It’s unfortunately not common (yet?).
Where I live we don't really discuss salaries and I think that mostly comes down to society being tricked into believing it's a bad thing. However our national statistics agency has made salary statistics public, which means anyone easily check their salary range and see if they're being underpaid. I actually prefer that to discussing with co-workers because you end up getting a much better picture of your industry.
In my country I’m only aware of statistics published by a newspaper (source may be statista, some agency or a job portal). I find the values weird however as I earn way above the stated value for my general description. I’m in a bit of a niche however so that might work to my benefit. The statistics still feel like ‘expectation management’ to me though.
All of scandinavia. There are public registers where you can look up the salary of everyone for norway, sweden and finland. When these registers were introduced, the salaries were normalized across the whole population
In Denmark, I'm part of a union which publishes salary stats for every possible job title, management responsibility, education, in a fairly convoluted matrix. Still, this allows me to easily negotiate with companies and see how well they pay. There might be something organised by the government, but I've never had a need for it.
I like the idea of a register a lot.
Do you also talk about it though? I was in Denmark on business for a couple of weeks and I don’t recall there being a discussion about it.
In China, "How much do you make?" Is right up there with "What's your name?".
Pretty disarming for unsuspecting foreigners.
That would indeed be a WTF moment for me.