This is an interesting discussion. As part of a movement, where individuals don't feel comfortable disclosing even their real names or identities, what one earns, would be something very personal.
I would like to reiterate the question about the purpose of this disclosure.
Apart from all the cultural issues and the legal requirement for disclosing salaries, if the figures are repeatedly disclosed by chapters, it would create an expectation among future employees. Some implications of these open disclosures (For EU, non-EU chapters and Movement wide)-
* If certain European chapters start disclosing the figures of their employees publicly, won't it create perception of what the other chapter should pay? This would be something similar to Anti-trust. A new chapter might have to abide by that standard set by other chapter, the internal metrics about what sort of funding a chapter gets, what benefits they offer aside, which might be limited internally; the outside perception would be set.
* The second implication would be Wage parity in Non-EU chapters. Wages within EU are relatively within a range, by going by the assumption that chapter don't deviate much from the average of their own country, would this put a burden on Non-EU chapters? They are essentially part of the same movement, and if dependent on a grant from WMF, not much different in this case.
* Their would be without doubt great amount of wage parity within the movement. I'm not sure if that high amount of transparency would be helpful for anyone. For example, WMF undertook an effort last year to promote professionalization among chapters, WMF follows its own metric and presumably California law when it comes to Salary and wage dispensation, but when WMF pays a chapter, to hire a staff, is their some internal set of standards that it expects chapters to comply with? or are they free to set them as they see fit. If disclosures have to be set, apart from the legal requirement, it should be a top-down approach to internal standards.
Delphine's suggestion about a salary grid is great, but I believe that if once set, this grid would be something more chapters would be expected to abide by, or come close to. This might be a good or a bad thing depending on how you look at it.
Regards Theo
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 2:47 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.netwrote:
I think that wage transparency is very much a cultural thing. For instance, if you plug my job title and employer into Google, you will get a figure back which is more or less what I actually earn. I don't regard this as a problem at all, and it's pretty much regarded as the way things are in Australia (where things like negotiating a salary are reserved to very high level positions or American companies setting up a local branch office).
The legal safeguards seem to be in place in France (disclosure of highest
salaries) to ensure that noone is paid above what the organisation can and should afford, so why the need for total transparency?
Let me turn that one around, and ask, what is the justification for *not *having total transparency? I would think that starting with 100% transparency and then selectively blocking out pieces of information only after due consideration is the way to go, especially if the primary source of funding is donations being made by the general public. If you start from the other position, and only share information if you are legally required to or if it paints you in a favourable light, well, that's not really *meaningful *transparency in my book.
Cheers, Craig
On 5 February 2012 19:09, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Delphine Ménard, 05/02/2012 09:11:
This said, I believe that transparency can take many forms. In this case, I would suggest that an option might be putting in place a solid salary grid (grille salariale), which gives a range of what salary can be expected for what position (the grid can be "broad" enough so that people don't feel their salary has been disclosed). Cultural and local practices need to be taken into consideration of course (as Stu pointed out, align with the local job market to some extent).
A grid may also have the important effect of telling people who are joining the organisation what kind of progress they can expect within it, which I find is both reassuring and motivating for employees. It also helps the management to think about what structure to give the organisation. Wikimedia Deutschland published not too long ago a plan for hiring and staff which, if it is just a "plan" also brought up the question of "how do we want to organize in the future?" and that was, I think, extremely helpful, as it structured the way employees see their job and future within the organisation.
I think this is a good approach, but there's room for complete
disclosure of
wages in it too, just with a bit more work for interested people, which
is
good. For instance, in my university, which has to follow state law and has
some
autonomy, managers' wages are very public, but all the others are in
4×~10
classes for staff plus 3×~20 classes for prof., the class one belongs to
is
very clear (not for profs, actually) and there are tables in the website which tell you exactly what each class costs/takes (this is a local decision). Nobody complains about it, actually there are problems only
when
people don't find the data because they're stupid and complain randomly about wages, but then it's easy to tell them that it's just their fault.
The
other problem are those few millions euros which aren't regulated by
those
classes; internal clarity is the first priority.
Nemo
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