@sg said in RL things I love:
I'd argue coworkers should know what their coworkers make, especially in fields where pay is negotiated.
I have to agree. When I was much, much younger I moved from one State to another. I transferred within the company I worked. I can't recall the exact amounts so they're just examples...
When I transferred my pay was set at $16.50 an hour. Moving from a rural area to metropolitan, the pay wasn't really enough for anyone with any sort of bills to get on solo. Rent alone to be near to work was something like 45-50% of my income. Whatever, I've been in worse positions.
After being there for about 8 months or so, the conversation of pay came up between myself and coworkers. Mostly because one person mentioned how much they made, more of a slip than anything. Then when I expressed some measure of: Excuse me, wtf?, others began volunteering how much they made. Many of them were making upward of $25-28 on the hour. Doing the exact same job, same amount of time on a weekly basis, same everything.
Well, maybe they worked their way up to that point? I can certainly understand that and I'm perfectly fine with putting in time and effort to work toward raises. That's fair. That's reasonable. That's logical.
But that wasn't the case. Many of them had started out at a couple $$ shy of where they were at that time. They had got raises to reach that point, but not by much. Every one of them to the last was astonished how much I was being paid because at that rate I was making substantially lower than any of them when they had first started out - and by that point I had been with the company for a couple years, so I wasn't some new hire or something. The general consensus was that the only difference between any of us? Was that I wasn't a local. I was from out of town.
The next day following that little conversation I went right to HR and we had it out. They tried to intimidate me by informing me that "discussing pay among coworkers is a cause for termination". Fuck you. Don't try to play me like that because I will stab your ass with a stapler, kidnap your dog, and send ransom photos from Tijuana with @Royal. In the end they bent because I think they realized that I could cause a lot more problems for them legally. They gave me a bump of a few dollars and tried to imply that it must have been a clerical error. After that everything was peachy until I transferred out again a bit later.
So yes, I absolutely do believe you should know what your coworkers make. Even if it's what @Tinuviel said and was more ballpark. "Everyone makes $23-26 on the hour" or something. Otherwise it leaves far too much space for corporate douchebags to fuck over someone trying to put in their time and make a living simply because they aren't acclimated to the local norms.