What? Am I reading this on HN? The place where people like talking how privacy matter all day and how annoying the fallacy of "if you have nothing to hide you shouldn't worry about the government/corporations spying on you" is? I'm puzzled.
What makes you think salary is a matter of privacy? In a lot of countries, many government jobs come with publicly disclosed salaries. Why do you think a job in a private sector should maintain secrecy for salaries?
Privacy applies to private data. Whether salary should be considered private data is the point of argument here. Nobody is arguing about doing away with privacy altogether. So what is your point?
Fair point. I chose a poor example there. A better example would be: Engineering jobs (not the IT or software kind but licensed engineering jobs) in many European and Asian companies have publicly disclosed salaries.
Except most contracts in the private sector (IT, finance, etc.) are not between two consenting adults. They are usually between one consulting adult and a huge corporation, a corporation that can choose to pay a certain class of people unfairly and still survive in business. It is in the interest of such corporations to maintain this asymmetry of information where they can know your salary and all your colleagues' salary but would discourage you from knowing your colleague salary.
If you think salary being private data is the obvious assumption, then think again, maybe you have been conditioned by years of employment in the private sector to believe that salary is private data. In many cultures and in many type of jobs, it is not considered private data.
And how would you know you were being paid unfairly unless someone made their salary public?
That's the issue here. You could be working for a company and never know you're being grossly underpaid until Bob casually mentions his salary being 15-20k over yours despite joining at the same time.
Don't companies like Glassdoor solve this problem? You don't need to know everyone's salary as long as you know the average, median and maximum in a specific corporation in a geographical area.
I don't see how making everyone's salary public will help more than knowing the average/median etc.
> I see that you hold the belief that consenting adults willingly working are being forced to do so ...
No, I don't believe that.
I was pointing out that employment contracts are usually not between two consenting adults. They are usually between a consenting adult and a consenting corporation. I never implied any party is forced to do anything here.
Please don't be condescending. I obviously know that corporations are not made of aliens. Corporations are not made of a group of people, which is precisely my point. With a corporation or conglomeration, the dynamics of negotiation usually becomes very different from what it is when you negotiate with a single consenting adult.
I did not elaborate this further and I am still not elaborating a lot here because these things were obvious.
For example, imagine negotiating a job offer with a single person client vs. negotiating a job offer with a large company. I think it is obvious that the negotiation dynamics are very different in both cases.
Depending on the situation, it may be easy to walk away from the first job but not so from the second job. Things like a large company would pay for my health insurance, would offer more job security, would offer me internal transfer, etc. make it a little more difficult to walk away from it. The fact that jobs in large corporations may appear lucrative to many people also puts the corporations in a position of more power where they can afford to negotiate unfairly with some people and still remain in business.
The parent comment never implied that anyone was forced to take a job at gun point. Why are you putting words into our mouths?
The parent comment implies that not everybody has a choice. This is true and this is not necessarily the same thing as being forced to take a job, much less at gun point.
You don't have a choice when every corporate in your city would try to lowball prospective employees belonging to a certain class into accepting a lower than market rate salary.
> Point me to anyone who has had a gun pointed at them to be forced to take a job and I will agree with you.
This was your earlier comment. You were responding to another comment (not mine) where you were seeing someone was forced to take a job although nothing like that was implied in the parent comment.
Publishing a taxable income (not the source of this income) is surely not "government spying on you" because government needs those numbers anyway. You could maybe argue it's "corporations spying on you", but I think it's still far from being in the same league as tracking your mobile phone location or logging your web searches.
What? Am I reading this on HN? The place where people like talking how privacy matter all day and how annoying the fallacy of "if you have nothing to hide you shouldn't worry about the government/corporations spying on you" is? I'm puzzled.