Matthew Gates https://knowyourworth.site 5m 1,194 #knowyourworth
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
If you could make the world a better place, one where there is not competition, but one where everyone valued each other, knowing that everyone has a different price, but that does not make them any more or less better than you, even for those who do the same job or different jobs, give or take a few additional tasks here and there, would you willingly hand over your salary? Imagine if the person sitting next to you knew what you were getting paid and you knew what they were getting paid. The idea has cross businesses for years and even influenced a CEO to take a pay cut himself in order to pay his entire staff a base rate of $70,000 per year.
Once things return to normal after COVID-19 has calmed down and we have returned to work or many of us will be applying for jobs, we must realize that while these companies have taken a hard hit and a loss in the public domain, it does not mean they can devalue what you are worth. This is not to say that every fast food employee has the right to demand $15 an hour. However, it may be time for the people to start setting their own salaries by showing companies what everyone makes and what everyone wants or is demanding to make.
By sharing your salary, you are setting a goal for everyone in the world to understand what that salary is like in a specific area. This is not to say that cost of living and area will not affect the price of how much a job is going to pay. For example, a marketing agency in New York City is going to bring in far more revenue than a marketing agency in Nebraska. Location and message are everything, but at least knowing what people in the general vicinity of your area are making can help you make better choices when you walk in and demand a salary.
When people remain silent on their salary, corporations win. And this was never about winning, but being treated fairly. This is also not an advocation for socialism. This salary movement allows both people and companies to be more transparent with each other, even knowing that someone might be making $5,000 more than you. The taboo of not sharing salary has always created competition amongst companies to allow their employees to compete over being the best, and this is great.
At Confessions of the Professions, a woman deserves more money than a man if she does more work and a man deserves more money than a woman if his job position calls for it. Fairness in treatment and payment for your work is important and will allow us to work in a world where we accept the fact that competition will always exist, everyone can work better and more accordingly rather than having the dreaded numbers in the back of their head. There is, of course, a way this could easily backfire. How does a CEO look at their employees and not feel some guilt? Easy. They are a CEO. But truth is, would you hate your coworker knowing they made more than you?
It might also reveals those who do less work yet for some reason get paid more and this could bring up a lot of issues as well. However, the general purpose of this salary tool will allow you to not only input your own data for your job, but the data of others, and it serves as a database for those of you who wish to do research when it comes to understanding and asking for your new salary.
I personally spoke to the man who built it. His name is Nicolas Granja, a 30-year old software engineer from Montevideo, Uruguay. He works for Tarmac and in his spare time develops web apps such as Know Your Worth which is a free tool that gathers data about your job, gender, location, salary, etc. By entering in this data which is completely anonymous, you are helping the world understand how much their jobs may be worth, how much the world values what we do for our work. With the COVID-19 pandemic still running amass, it will come to see an end eventually, and the economy will restart.
Everyone will head back to work. Some were lucky enough to keep their jobs and have been working the entire time. Some were laid off temporarily to file for unemployment and are now back and working again. And many others will be applying for new jobs or changing their careers. Fortunately, we are not recovering from a zombie pandemic. We are recovering from a virus that is somewhat more severe than the flu for some people. Jobs are not gone. The economy is not dead. The stock market is certainly up and down and all around right now, and while it did take a nice giant dump on March 19, 2020, most stocks have since recovered. Some will remain forever broke, some will take a long time to recover, and many others are doing just fine. Life will go back to normal. Everything will resume as it once was.
Yes, life will be somewhat different as we are now living in a world where we had to observe the extreme severity of what a virus can do if humans do not have a cure to help us fight it. However, life will still continue. People will go back to work. Many more people want to go out to eat and buy things at the mall. Life will completely go back to normal and everyone will likely forget about the “year the Earth stood still”, but for a brief moment, Earth was breathing better.
Anyways, even with the economy returning back to normal, we still have skills and talents that are valued at specific prices. The more knowledge you have, the more you may get paid. If you are a CEO, you have a certain charisma about you that allows you to pull in generally 30 times the ampunt that employees make at your company. However, it is unlikely that you are the CEO of a company because you applied for the job. In most cases, you had been working there for years, and you talked to the right people, made the right moves, and there you are, appointed as the CEO by the board of a company, and now you have a very generous package, and will probably get a great retirement too. Yes, it is amazing and you probably earned it.
The idea behind sharing a salary is simply to reduce the gender gap, eliminate discrimination of all types in the workplace, and to reveal the value a company places on a specific job position. This positon may entail additional tasks that may or may not be mentioned, and therefore, additional compensation may be guaranteed, but to understand the base pay. Sometimes, it is almost always in a company’s best interest to be transparent about the salary they provide to each of their employees.
If you are interested in using this salary tool, visit Know Your Worth.
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