NYC Poised to Ban Firms From Asking Job Candidates About Pay (bloomberg.com) 142
In a vote this week, the New York City approved legislation that will ban employers from asking job applicants about what they make in their current or past job and could have far-reaching consequences beyond the city as employers try to standardize their practices. From a report: "This bill will go a long way in addressing wage disparities women -- and particularly women of color -- face," said Public Advocate Letitia James, who sponsored the measure. White women in New York earn on average 84 percent of what white men earn, while Asian women earn 63 percent, black women earn 55 percent and Hispanic women just 46 percent, according to a report from the advocate's office, based on U.S. Census data. Asking about pay in a job interview hurts women who may start from a lower level than male candidates -- an effect that compounds over time. "It perpetuates discrimination," James said. "And it has an effect on their pensions as well."
The wage gap myth continues... (Score:2, Informative)
While I do agree that questioning pay should be banned, I really wish they would stop with the "Women get paid less than men" myth. Continuing to use it is fake news.
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The wage gap myth is, for some reason, easy to perpetuate no matter how many times you throw facts back at it. It's a politician's, feminist's, and SJW's crutch to lean on.
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Re: The wage gap myth continues... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: The wage gap myth continues... (Score:5, Interesting)
https://hired.com/gender-wage-... [hired.com]
Thank you for posting that. The key elements from that report are clear to most:
First, what is the pay disparity:
Our data shows that 63% of the time women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company. This figure has improved slightly from 69% since our 2016 report. On average, women are paid 4% less than male applicants for the same role
Then look up the negotiation of wages:
When examining our candidates’ preferred salaries, we discovered that for 69% of the roles for which both a man and a woman were given an initial offer, women set their preferred salary less than men. Women asked for an average of 4% less than men.
The pay disparity is almost entirely (but not quite entirely) due to men asking for more money, and women asking for less money.
There are plenty of books on the subject like "Women Don't Ask" and "Nice Girls Don't Get The Corner Office", but the studies they cite show that men are about 8x more likely to ask for money during salary negotiations, and when they do, men ask for more money than women. Men ask for raises/bonuses/promotions anywhere from 4x to 8x more often than women.
Most of the difference is men ASK for more, and generally women who also ask will get it. Once they decide to hire, the companies generally pay whatever the candidate asks.
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Pretending to have a convesation with yourself does not help you prove your point.
While the gender-based unexaplained wage gap may be as low as 3%-7% in the U.S., the larger part, that which is explained by what positions people are working, is widely recognized an an indicator of hiring bias. Whether it's unequal pay for equal work or unequal opportunity for equal qualifications, it is still a problem that compounds on itself over a lifetime. The wage gap stat represents both factors.
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Yep, there's an immense hiring bias in nursing, teaching, garbage collection, lobster fishing, and ice road trucking.
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About 16 percent of the stay-at-home parent population is male. Should salaries be based on whether your spouse earns or housemakes? Should employers assume women don't have a househusband? Is having a "non-working" spouse providing free day care, taxi service, coupon cutting, grocery delivery, personal shopping services, and secretarial and butler duties a liability?
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Really. If that actually were true, the Fortune 500 would be staffed by as many Hispanic women as they could hire. . .
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By the way they measure Pay gap, we need to start locking up a lot more women!!! After all they are only about 3% of the prison population. Obvious Sexism!
Re: It feels like the Dice era around here again. (Score:2)
Climate change is not a controversial subject, it's fact.
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I'm sorry, but there's an entire political ideology that believes that if it makes gas cheap, CO2's properties magically change, so I'm not interested in those who weight their subjective ideologies higher than objective reality.
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But if everyone lies, doing so just keeps you at relative par- the problems with it still exist.
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There's no reason why everybody would have to the lie by the same percentage.
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So you both lie by 5K- you might be better off percentage wise, but the gap is still the same. And you're assuming everyone realizes they need to do this.
I don't know if this action is the right answer, but lying about your wage isn't sufficient (and could be used as grounds for an at fault firing later).
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Or, just say: I only made such-and-such amount where I worked before, but for this new job I want this-and-that. Not lying, and you can straighten out any gap in one go.
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Actually, the interesting thing is that a decent amount of what's left of the gap once you've properly controlled for all factors can be explained by, well, the long-known problem that women just don't ask. But hey, let's keep on not talking about how girls being socialized to suck at aggression is a problem--not just in being aggressive, but in using it properly.
If you want to get rid of the gap, you might well be better off having any question of what wage you're currently making, have made in the past,
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In my 3rd world country, asking for current pay is forbidden.
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Because if you lie and the lie ever gets found out it gives them an easy excuse to fire you.
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Just do a good job, and there's no incentive to fire you.
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Because if you lie and the lie ever gets found out it gives them an easy excuse to fire you.
German law: If an employer asks a question that they are legally not allowed to ask, then an employee or prospective employee has the right to lie, and this can not in any way held against them. Most common example is asking a woman "are you pregnant". If she is pregnant, she can completely legally say "Yes" (no job), "You are not allowed to ask this question" (no job), or "No" (gets the job, takes maternity leave five months later).
It doesn't actually make any sense to dictate "you can't ask this questi
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Interesting point. HR due diligence usually involves a "background check", which is a euphemism for gathering data which is loosely related or sometimes unrelated to job requirements. Asking for a W-2 costs nothing so background checking services do it routinely.
I had a situation where I was applying for a job while self-employed. For complicated reasons, supplying a W-2 was not an option. In the end, the employer and I both agreed that my current income had nothing to do with the price of tea in China,
Not going to change anything (Score:4, Interesting)
Just because you don't know what someone made in their previous job doesn't mean that they'll be offered more.
Re:Not going to change anything (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not going to change anything (Score:4, Insightful)
Revealing your previous salary never, ever helps you. The only things that the company can do with that information all screw you somehow.
It's pretty normal to give this information in the UK. I've been refusing and it seems to be a useful test to filter out crap companies that aren't able to handle this situation.
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Revealing your previous salary never, ever helps you.
It helps me a lot in weeding out recruiters for jobs not senior enough for me. In general, if you're making more than market, and want to stay that way, you need to talk about it. If you're making less than market, it will be used against you.
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You can use this to your advantage - there's no legal duty to give an accurate figure, or in fact, a figure at all. They have no right to access your past salary information to confirm anything either.
As such, when they ask, you can just as well give an inflated figure to try and get an inflated offer.
This is why I don't even bother asking when I hire - I just offer people's salary based on what I believe them to be worth regardless of what they ask for or claim to have been worth previously.
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Problem is that if they then check your references and ask what your salary was, you may get found out. They may realize you inflated the number, which around here is grounds for being sacked.
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They can't do that, it's illegal, it's a breach of the Data Protection Act.
If they sack you for obtaining information that they have no legal right to obtain then you can take them to an industrial tribunal and get compensated for a small fortune and the Information Commissioner will have a substantial fine to hand out to both parties too.
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I don't think data protect prevents your previous employer disclosing your salary if asked directly. They may refuse of course.
In any case, you also need to be careful with your P45. You can write to HMRC and ask them not to disclose your previous tax code to your new employer, but of course it will look pretty dodgy if you already told them your previous salary and are now trying to hide it.
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No it really does - it's personal data and they have no legal basis to hand it over on a whim to another company asking for it, whatever the purpose. The days are even gone where a company can verify sickness absence records against a previous employer without your permission - they cannot in a reference even ask how much time you had off sick as it's again classed now as personal information that cannot be arbitrarily handed out.
The only thing an employer can do is demand you provide evidence of your prev
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As a hiring manager it is fairly typical move to disqualify candidates that previously earned too much out of fear that they will leave shortly.
Lie. There's just no downside for telling a prospective employer you make less than you actually do. No one is going to be pissed at that, even if it is somehow discovered.
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>If they're going to leave shortly perhaps then they're overqualified for the position or your not paying appropriately.
And often the hiring manager has ZERO control or flexibility on what can be offered. People here rarely see the view of the employer or hiring manager. When there are hundreds of applications, previous pay *is* a good indicator of WASTING THE EMPLOYER'S TIME. If they are overqualified and/or were making too much for what you could pay, most of the time (not always) they will not stay
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Just mandate that the pay be stated upfront in the original job ad. No more trying to guess what an employer is willing to pay without going too high and ruling yourself out of the game or too low from ignorance of (secret) pay rates and ripping yourself off. Just a simple, open, honest statement of what the employer is willing to pay so you can decide upfront whether you want to apply or not.
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No, don't you understand? Wasting everybody's time is a moral imperative. How are we supposed to live with ourselves if we don't make people spend over an hour paging through tens of websites to buy a widget? And for a job applicant? You gotta make sure they wear out at least one keyboard before they get in the door.
Re:Not going to change anything (Score:4, Interesting)
Just mandate that the pay be stated upfront in the original job ad.
When I advertise for a "programmer", I usually don't have a specific salary in mind. If one applicant is more capable than another, then I will offer more. If I put a low salary range in the ad, the better candidates will not apply. If I put a high range, then I will be flooded with responses from lousy candidates that are not even remotely qualified for that salary.
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The problem is the employer-employee relationship is asymmetrical. The employer has all the power.
In your case, you should have a range of sala
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To argue otherwise is disingenuous.
Nonsense. One programmer can be ten times as productive as the average programmer. Plenty of programmer are less than one-tenth as productive as the average. When I run an ad, I just don't know the range of candidates I am going to get. If I realize I am interviewing a superstar, then I will make a much higher offer, and I don't want to dissuade the best applicants from applying by (falsely) indicating a fixed salary. I am also often willing to take a chance on a bright self-taught kid, but I don't wan
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The problem is the employer-employee relationship is asymmetrical. The employer has all the power.
Only if there's a large pool of other good candidates available. I've seen employers spend 4 months interviewing candidates until they finally get someone with proper skills. I've also been that candidate, and I got hired with a 100% pay raise compared to previous job.
Re: Not going to change anything (Score:2)
That's not true at all.
If you're competent, there are plenty of companies that want to hire you. The employee is therefore free to work with whatever employer he prefers, based on what the role, compensation or other perks are.
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As long as you put some kind of range in that's genuine no matter how broad then that's all that matters.
When I see a job ad listing with salary as "neg." I read it as "negligible", because that's usually what they mean. I don't even waste my time, usually "negotiable" is code for "We're not going to publish a figure because it's so low, no one would apply, so instead we'll trick them into calling us so that we can try in vain to convince them as to why they should take our role for fuck all money".
Government butt out (Score:1, Insightful)
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There is no need for government to insert itself into a market driven process during a salary negotion between a potential employer and employee.
History shows this to be sometimes false. Often true, yes, but sometimes government needs to step in.
Usually it isn't individual workers who take actions, it is a group. They form a group called a labor union, and they negotiate wages for the group. Sometimes the government does need to get involved in those cases where the disputes are large. In those cases government needs to step in when the disputes get out of hand.
Unions have issues, the highest top performers tend to lose some negotiating power, b
How do these statistics work? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm working at a business with low pay--where the average for a programmer is $96k here, programmers make $74k. The same is true of most IT staff, running a good 20%-30% short of the industry median.
We're also fairly diversified and have chicks and people from all over the world in our staff, and have had folks who speak Russian or obscure Indian dialects as a primary language in prominent technical positions. They're also poorly-paid, although near as I can tell we all have about the same salary.
It seems like a form of posturing: we don't want to pay salaries, so we create a perception of ... something. We're a good place to work because of something something benefits diversity open-door-policy.
Are these studies by industry, region, experience, and business? Do we say that black women earn 55% as much as white men, or do we say that black women at business X in job Y earn 55% as much as white men in business X at job Y? What happens if business X mostly hires white men for job Y, and business X' hires a higher proportion of black and asian women for job Y but also pays like shit even if you're a white man?
Re:How do these statistics work? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm working at a business with low pay--where the average for a programmer is $96k here, programmers make $74k. The same is true of most IT staff, running a good 20%-30% short of the industry median.
We're also fairly diversified and have chicks and people from all over the world in our staff, and have had folks who speak Russian or obscure Indian dialects as a primary language in prominent technical positions. They're also poorly-paid, although near as I can tell we all have about the same salary.
It seems like a form of posturing: we don't want to pay salaries, so we create a perception of ... something. We're a good place to work because of something something benefits diversity open-door-policy.
Are these studies by industry, region, experience, and business? Do we say that black women earn 55% as much as white men, or do we say that black women at business X in job Y earn 55% as much as white men in business X at job Y? What happens if business X mostly hires white men for job Y, and business X' hires a higher proportion of black and asian women for job Y but also pays like shit even if you're a white man?
That doesn't work. Recruiters will successfully poach someone getting underpaid or unhappy. So, it seems like you're unhappy about getting underpaid.
Competition is why people earn what they earn what they earn. Your employer cannot get away with paying you $x when employer B will pay you $(x+y). At a statistical level, maybe race and gender matters but on a personal level there are too many variations [bbc.com].
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We used to have a revolving door, but I'm working with coworkers who have mostly been here for 3-5 years now. They're all cognizant of the market; we regularly talk about how we can't hire additional people because we pay way below market rates--which includes our pay, considering some of us have been offered 80% pay increases at other jobs doing the same shit.
Some of us are stable. Others just don't care to deal with a job change. A few thought the job would be interesting and now are afraid of jumpi
Re:How do these statistics work? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you pay less, you get less. I worked for a company that had about 20 programmers making $30k in the heart of Silicon Valley. How did we do it? We hired kids straight out of high school and trained them as code monkeys, to whip up Javascript or throw-away Perl scripts. Most of our projects were quick one-off stuff, and when we did need to maintain something for the long term we had one of our "real" programmers clean it up. This actually worked amazingly well, and the company was profitable for years. I kept in touch with many of those kids, and most of them went on to successful tech careers, and one of them even got a PhD from Stanford.
One thought...... (Score:1)
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Female candidates are about to become a protected class...
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Female candidates are about to become a protected class...
They already are. You can't ask about gender during the interview process. It is usually obvious when a candidate shows up for the interview, but it isn't always obvious during the screening process, especially with a name like Pat or Chris. You also cannot ask about pregnancy, marital status, number of children, or future childbearing plans, which are all issues that disproportionately affect women.
Several women have told me that they removed their wedding rings before job interviews.
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You are green, grasshopper. Look up "protected classes" and then do some research on the hoops HR and interviewers have to jump through to avoid being sued. Long story short, there's not much "first amendment" left if you're a company/target of any size.
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Oh, there is plenty of "wiggle room" for creative hiring questions that expose weaknesses in "protected class" applicants. It is just a riduculous hurdle to jump over, and does nothing to stop anything.
"We like our employees to _________, are you willing?" Where _______ is an innocuous question on the surface, but also lets you know the answer to a forbidden question by assumption.
Prohibited speech doesn't solve the problem to someone who is determined. It just makes it harder to have legitimate questions a
Why do they care? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never understood why someone's current salary is important to an employer. A job pays what the job is worth and the skill set the candidate brings to the table. It should not pay based on what someone is currently making as there is no relationship.
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It sets a low bar. Employers generally want to pay as little as possible, so if they know how low a candidate is willing to go, they can offer only a marginal raise above that level.
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Prediction: employers who yell the loudest about this restriction will be the ones with the most aggressive market-segregation strategies preventing you from getting a simple or even ballpark price quote without extensive interaction with a VAR partner.
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It sets a low bar.
It is only looking at once part of the equation. I voluntarily took a pay cut with my current job. I figure not having any after hours responsibilities and getting 7 weeks annual leave each year more than made up for that.
You lose a LOT of context just by asking about salary.
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They ask because information is power. They now know what your basis for negotiation is while you don't know theirs. If you number is well below what they were thinking they'll low-ball you. If it is too high they'll still offer what they were going to. It's the same reason some places I've worked asked you not to discuss raises with co-workers. The less information you have to benchmark the better position the company is in.
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Because there's generally a pay range for that position. It's actually pretty rare for an open position to be something like "$90K a year, no wiggle room". It's more likely to be something like "$80-95K a year, depending on experience".
And if they know you were making, say, $75K at your last job, maybe they'll offer you something in the lower range, because while it's still more money to you, it's less money that they have to offer.
So they can low ball you and pocket the difference (Score:2)
Duh.
E.g. If I'm willing to pay $80k for the position, but I know you make $60k and I offer $70k you will probably take it as it's an increase for you and I pocket the $10k difference because you have 0 way of knowing how much I'm willing to pay to start with.
That's why ALL interviewers ask this question EVERYWHERE and will not proceed with interviews without this information unless prohibited by law.
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A job pays what the job is worth and the skill set the candidate brings to the table.
The problem is that a job interview only gives a very tiny peek into that "skill set". At my company, a candidate programmer will spend several hours writing code, and that is a good measure of their ability to write a 50 line function. But it is NOT a good measure of their ability to troubleshoot and patch a system with 200,000 lines of code written by semi-competent people that left five years ago.
Disclaimer: I never ask "What was your previous salary?" because that just encourages lying. Instead I as
Can they still ask how much pay you require? (Score:1)
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It at least gives them the chance to have done their homework
Pay negotiations still have to happen (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's how it should happen.
Re:Pay negotiations still have to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
That's how it should happen.
And that's definitely not how it happens. Businesses by and large no longer negotiate. At least, big businesses. They know what they're going to pay and that's it. There is no discussion. If you ask for more, they will simply say no (speaking from experience). HR has a schedule: job title X with Y years of experience and Z tenure gets salary Alpha, and that's an end of it. They do this specifically to avoid discrimination lawsuits. If women in the company have lower average salaries than men, it's invariably because they have y experience, where y < the Y the men have.
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I work for a very large organization here and I had no problem negotiating with them and getting what I wanted pay wise
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I work for a very large organization here and I had no problem negotiating with them and getting what I wanted pay wise
Usually what you're negotiating in that circumstance is for the job title that pays what you want. So you're a Software Developer III instead of a Software Developer II. You'd better believe that you're making the same $Alpha that every other Software Developer III makes from your employer.
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funny... I've only worked for very large companies that would be on top employer lists and every single time I've been able to negotiate salaries, both changing shops and internal transfers to new companies I negotiated salary. And it's not like I was senior in any of these roles.
granted, if you aren't willing to say no to a company (or at least look like you are willing to say no), then you won't have any negotiating power.
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bullshit (Score:2, Funny)
"Asking about pay in a job interview hurts women who may start from a lower level than male candidates -- an effect that compounds over time."
Really?
You're telling me WOMEN have never heard of 'lying'?
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it's not legal for a previous employer to say what they were paying you in many countries (though not all). If they do, it is grounds for a privacy violation suit. Most companies to avoid suits for having said "too much" will usually only confirm employment history, not anything else.
If it isn't, usually there are non-disclosure accords in your work contract (you cannot disclose your salary to anyone outside family and legal consultation), and it is trivial to say you want that to flow both ways (I've work
Targeting the wrong discrimination (Score:2)
"...Asian women earn 63 percent, black women earn 55 percent and Hispanic women just 46 percent."
Reading this, it seems that racial discrimination is a larger problem than gender discrimination.
Unfortunately, it's no easier to hide skin color than it is gender. Regardless, all forms of discrimination should end.
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On that point, if you reverse the scenario, the few Hispanic women that can be found in Asia probably make a lot more than Asian women.
And it isn't the fact that Hispanic women are more favored in Asia. It's just the fact that if you (or your family) crosses an ocean to get somewhere, you're probably way ahead of the curve in terms of wealth, connections, or education than the poor local illiterate girl who comes from a local farming family, or the local slums, of an adjacent country.
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if you (or your family) crosses an ocean to get somewhere, you're probably way ahead of the curve in terms of wealth, connections, or education
I can't speak for Asia, but I do know that those in Latin America who are well-off generally don't want to leave for the US. This partly explains why Latin-American food in the US is so bad: those who can cook well stay in their own country because they can make plenty there.
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What's a "pension"? (Score:3)
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A job benefit many people used to have but that will certainly not be part of the current "Great Again" makeover.
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Something mandatory in most of the world regardless of who you work for and even if you work for yourself.
So ... (Score:1)
Group X makes Y% of Group Z (Score:2)
Big deal.
Get back to me with numbers based on Group X makes Y% of Group Z for the same job description and experience level and then we can start to worry about corrective measures.
Drafty nether regions (Score:2)
"It perpetuates discrimination," James said. "And it has an effect on their pensions as well."
Now I know they're blowing smoke up my ass. Pensions? What pensions? I've heard of this mythical beast. I've never seen it. Boomers got pensions. I'm Gen-X. The pensions were gone, gone gone by the time I entered the workforce.
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I think they meant it as a general term for "retirement"; if you don't fixate specifically on pension in the traditional sense, it's a true statement. If they're contributing x% of a lower salary, that's worse than x% of a higher salary. If there's a company match, it's a function of salary as well.
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>"If there's a company match, it's a function of salary as well."
Um, no. Most employers around here, including mine, match a flat amount of DOLLARS and has nothing to do with % of pay.
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Hm. I don't know where "here" is for you, but I stand partially corrected. I've only ever heard of percentage matches, and never encountered or heard of a dollar match. But you learn something every day.
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That is because many employers frame it as, for example, "We will match your contribution up to 6% of your total pay per year." Some employers will then go further and then mention a hard limit dollar amount that they won't go beyond when matching contributions.
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And that's all a part of your negotiable compensation package.
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hm..... I'm millenial (at the cut off) and every company I've worked for offered a pension. it's quite the hassle actually, given that I have partial pension gains across 4 distinct companies. the US resident employer offered me 401k and a pension, which just made it all a bit weird (major US bank).
Wait (Score:2)
Quick and easy solution (Score:2)
Pass a law that requires all employers to cut all white men's pay by 50%, white women's by 40%, asian women's by 30%, etc, so all groups on average make exactly the same money. Problem solved, full equality for all! Only racist misogynists could possibly disapprove.
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First amendment? (Score:2)
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No, but you can ask what the pay is, XORed with a randomly-generated number known only to the answerer.
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The only reason for an interviewer to ask a question about a person's previous salary is if they are trying to indirectly ascertain how satisfied that person is with the salary that they were making.
If you answer plainly, then you communicate to the interviewer that you are or were satisfied with the salary, and if an interviewer is asking so that they can find the least expensive employee to hire, any increase over the amount you tell them is liable to be quite small.
Trying to dodge the question by te
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