If youre a worker today and you ask about your co-workers pay, you might be asked to pack up your belongings and shown the door.
A decade ago, the Institute for Womens Policy Research , or IWPR, conducted the first national survey that asked workers whether their bosses allowed them to discuss wages and salaries. Results revealed that half of all workers and approximately two-thirds of private sector workers were either formally banned or discouraged from talking about pay. Since 2010, 10 states and D.C. have passed legislation penalizing employers who retain these pay secrecy policies.
In 2017 and 2018, a team of us myself, Patrick Denice of Western University and Shengwei Sun, who recently joined IWPR partnered with the research firm GfK and expanded on IWPRs initial efforts. We surveyed nearly 2,600 full-time workers . Our findings indicate that these state-level efforts, and all the ongoing national attention to the issue of pay secrecy in the contemporary workplace, have proved ineffective.
Overall, half of full-time workers today labor under a pay secrecy policy of some sort. Among nonunion workers in the private sector, two-thirds cant exercise their free speech rights to disclose their own pay or ask about their peers pay. An analysis limited to those states that have taken action on the issue indicates employers have hardly noticed: Over 40 % of the working population remains subject to a pay secrecy policy.
One reason for the lack of movement? The enduring social norm against discussing wages and salaries. We asked those subject to a pay secrecy policy whether they supported this infringement of their free speech rights. The overwhelming majority said yes.
But there are emerging cracks . Our survey indicates that one group in particular is more likely to discuss pay with colleagues, more likely to know what their colleagues earn and more likely to reject the salary taboo explicitly: millennials.
What about those respondents subject to a pay secrecy policy? Our data reveal that millennials are more likely to violate the restriction. Among workers either discouraged or formally prohibited from talking about pay, over half of millennials report discussing pay with their colleagues, compared to just 26 % of baby boomers.
Is this simply a case of a broader embrace of an oversharing, extremely transparent lifestyle among a group that came of age in a landscape saturated by social media? Could be. But we argue for a different interpretation. Combined with their strong support for organized labor and willingness to vote for socialist political candidates, we contend that millennials rejection of pay secrecy rules reflects a set of workplace dynamics that our youngest workers recognize as fundamentally broken.
The basic underpinnings of the normative employment contract, as the sociologist Beth Rubin has termed it, that structured labor markets when past generations began their careers have eroded. The oldest millennials began their careers too late to enjoy the late-1990s economic expansion, and instead saw their incomes fall during the lost decade of the aughts. The youngest, meanwhile, finished schooling and embarked on careers during the onset of the Great Recession, with many struggling to gain a firm grip on a middle-class lifestyle during the uneven and prolonged recovery. As a result, millennials have lower earnings and less wealth than older generations did when they were of the same age. And, of course, young adults trying to enter the workforce today confront unemployment rates unrivaled since the Great Depression.
These broader economic trends may have created ripe conditions for younger workers to challenge long-standing workplace norms. One of these is the general prescription against talking about pay. Its an outdated norm and unfair violation of our freedom of speech that penalizes women and lowers all workers leverage when negotiating for a fairer share of company resources. You wont ask for a raise that you deserve if you dont know and cant find out that youre being underpaid.
Jake Rosenfeld, a professor of sociology at Washington University-St. Louis, is author of the forthcoming Youre Paid What Youre Worth and Other Myths of the Modern Economy.
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Commentary: Millennials are breaking the taboos on discussing salaries - Bend Bulletin
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