Talk About Your Salary?

I usually look to Ken Rockwell for camera advice, but sometimes he goes a little off topic.

I found his latest post, Talk About Your Salary to be VERY interesting.

His proposal is this: Talk with your coworkers about how much you are paid. While your boss can't tell you how much you get paid, what's the problem with knowing how much your coworkers get paid. This is the only real tool you have to negotiate salary effectively. Worst case, you find out that you're the highest paid. Best case, you have a coworker who does less work than you who is paid more and you can leverage that at an annual review. The only loser is your employer.

I think this is a really interesting topic and especially important for people in their twenties. Right out of school you're essentially useless and unskilled, but after a few years you have some skill sets that have been invested in you by your employer. If you're merely getting cost of living increases in total compensation, and the new hires are getting their base raised at a similar annual amount, it's possible that a newly hired coworker could be getting paid just as much or more than you. Yikes!

The real question is, how do you break the salary taboo culture? Are their implications here that Ken and I have missed?