This would apply to ~200M workers in the EU. Seems like a big deal, even if a handful of states in the US have similar policy. The entire US labor force only has ~164M workers. Other US states will catch up, eventually.
(Texas and Florida notably do not, and likely won't for some time due to state politics; they are the second [30M] and third [22M] states by population, respectively)
At least in Norway it's already public what everyone makes. I can look up the taxable salary information about anyone (so salary after deductions but it's probably ok close). Also, even without that, salary of public employees is part of the information you can request to view.
I feel discussing salaries is quite common here. At work someone made a spreadsheet everyone fills their salary into if they want, experience, tenure etc and you can see how you compare. It's a great way of leveling the information imbalance that's normally there.
Edit: not sure why I'm down voted. I'm just saying how it is here, don't take it out on me if you don't like the concept, heh!
Assuming I was Norwegian and for some reason was getting paid way more than my coworkers, could I format my deductions so that it looked like I was paid on par with them, but be able to recover most of the money later?
To avoid the social consequences amongst your peers? Perhaps that's not an issue in Norway, but it's an issue in the US.
I don't want my coworkers to know how much I make because if I'm making substantially more or less than them, it will affect how they perceive and interact with me.
This isn't really an issue, as far as I can tell. I feel in general most people get paid fairly, so if you're doing the same work as someone else the pay won't be that different.
I've always shared and talked salary with my coworkers, both when I was earning the least and the most of my coworkers. When I earned the least, they helped me with how to approach my boss for a raise; and now when I'm the best paid, I help my coworkers get what they deserve.
What if you are a kind of an high achiever, and companies would be willing to pay more for your output than an average one?
Or assume you do 2x better work, they initially pay you the same, then you get a better offer elsewhere, and they would want to match, but if they do, you would be getting paid a lot more than your coworkers.
Why do you not want for everyone to be treated fairly? If I earn more without good reason, why should I be more loyal to some rich owner than to my colleague that I am interacting with on a daily basis. Do people in the US think like this?
(Note though: I don't think many people acyually check each others tax returns, as that kind of already implies enviousness.)
> Why do you not want for everyone to be treated fairly?
That's a strange assumption to make. Of course I want everyone to be treated fairly.
> why should I be more loyal to some rich owner
It's not a matter of loyalty to some rich owner (particularly if I'm making much less than my coworkers[1]). It's a matter of getting along in the workplace.
[1] I have, and probably will again, taken positions where I was overtly underpaid because I was getting something else out of the job that I valued more than the money. But (at least in the US), people tend to equate your pay level with your skill level and value, so I certainly wouldn't want my coworkers to know.
> (Note though: I don't think many people acyually check each others tax returns, as that kind of already implies enviousness.)
I wouldn't directly check it, if they see that I have done so, but if I could have someone else check or similar, I would definitely get it checked what everyone makes. Not specifically because of envy, but it would just be a no brainer thing to do in terms of understanding the market.
In Sweden, you could do löneväxling, effectively transferring some of your salary to an investment account to be taxed when you cash out after retirement. That might make it look like you earn less on your taxes.
Note though that while people in the nordics are highly individualistic, most would never even think about such an idea of screwing over their colleagues. There are good reasons for löneväxling, but this is not one of them
Does the salary info include investment income or income from other sources, or only salaries from corporations? If you work as a barista would your taxable information be available as well?
You can look up tax lists in Norway but it's not anonymous since 2008. The person you look up will know that you did. While it is legal naturally it can have social consequences.
Everyone? I may misunderstand but it looks to me like a serious invasion of privacy and with a high potential for abuse.
The lesser form of abuse would be for a shop to loop up how wealthy a customer is for targeted advertising. But it can also be used to see whose kid is worth kidnapping, and everything in between, like refusing tenants with low salaries.
Everyone. Just search their name and select the correct personality from the list (based on zip code and age). People can, since a few years ago, see who has viewed them, which deters it a bit. But easy to just have a friend or something look up your coworker or boss if so.
Also, media gets everything and make lists. "This is what the soccer players make", "top 50 influencers" etc.
I don't think it's abused much. For wealthy kidnappings and so it's easier ways than to brute force names of potentials. Instead just look for CXOs or owners of companies that are doing ok (also public data). Refusing tenants with low salary is already done through credit agencies all over the world, this doesn't change anything in that regard either.
As for privacy: I guess you could say so. But as I said, it's part of the culture so I don't feel most people mind, and it helps us to get paid fairly.
Clickbait. Google 'Directive 2023/970' for many better other articles
A very amateur looking site too. Domain registered in 2023. Few Google references to the name. Can't handle HN load. The "About Us" contains a link to https://7bn.org/team , which gives a Cloudflare error and https://7bn.org returns a web hosting "Default Web Site Page"
And 50 upvotes while the site isn't even loading? Hilarious
Looks like ML-generated garbage with multiple accounts driving "traffic". HN is heavily infested with ML-generated posts and what appears to be account botnets voting or commenting with LLM-generated output.
Setting "showdead" to "yes" in HN profile settings is the red pill.
I recently triggered[0] some LLM-based robot, by mentioning poor air quality in India in scope of reported cancer rates. You can read the first paragraph of all these "[dead]" responses and you'll get the pattern.
Wow, thanks for posting that, it was seriously impressive and surreal.
I mean, even if it was entirely some random Indian poster with no automated assistance, which is still more than plausible, that speaks to a pretty shocking amount of dedication to shit things up that I usually only see on imageboards.
Then add in the obvious signs he tried to use AI at at least some stages, and that's where it gets actually wild to me, because if the posts were even slightly:
- more coherent
- less irrelevant
- less duplicated
- timed a bit further apart
I can totally see most undiscerning readers never assuming that was all one person or arguably less than one person with automation.
Sadly the coordinated up- and down-voting has been on the increase here lately. Most humans who frequent HN will agree but watch my comment getting flagged in minutes.
Title reads like there will be public access to all employees' salaris as of 2026. Obviously not quite the case.
> {...} Given that the main objective of the measure is to reduce salary inequality, companies will have to make salaries or salary ranges for each position public.
In addition, they will have to share with their employees the criteria used to set these remunerations. They will also have to provide information on salary inequalities within the company, broken down by gender.
> {...} As of 2026, employees will have the right to request and receive in writing information about their individual salary and the average salary ranges of colleagues performing the same job or one of equal value. {...} In order to maintain competitiveness and privacy, the European directive sets access limits to the information, prohibiting the request of this information for purposes other than the defense of their salary equality rights.
Wonder how this will work for remote companies. Will the post a super large band for positions ranging across Europe? Or will it geographically defined?
The title makes it very easy to make incorrect assumptions about how this works. It’s not individual salaries that are made public, just ranges and averages
Having a range at all greatly reduces individual bargaining power. My understanding is that the EU has had a terrible time recently attracting and retaining both businesses and talent. I don't see how this will help solve their issue.
Other companies know easily what their competitors are paying... you can't leverage labor market competition to bump your salary. You can't start a bidding war between employers.
If companies treat employees as commodities, which is largely the case, they don't have to collude to suppress salaries. The basic economics of commodities is enough.
The only way for employees to really have any bargaining power is to not be commodities; but trying to do that as employees is swimming against a strong economic current, because companies who can't treat their employees as commodities are in a more precarious business position than companies that can.
In other words, if you really think you're being underpaid as an employee compared to the value you create, your best option is to stop being an employee and become an owner of a company. And as an owner, if you are going to have any employees, you are going to end up under strong business pressure to treat them as commodities, so if you don't want to do that, your best option is to not have any employees in the first place: the owners either do the work themselves or outsource it to the owners of other companies with contracts.
> proper regulations that ensure labor protections
Don't. Regulatory capture is a thing.
> The relationship between employee and employer is fundamentally adversarial
In general, no, it is no more so than any contractual relationship.
However, to the extent that employees can be treated as commodities, that does add an adversarial element.
> the employer has all the power in that relationship.
Again, this is not true in general, but to the extent that employees can be treated as commodities, yes, that means their bargaining power is minimal.
However, this is not something that can be fixed by regulation, because, as above, employers, who, in the cases where employees can be treated as commodities, will be large corporations, can just buy the regulations that favor them. To the extent that they have to accept provisions that they would rather not have, for example minimum wage, limitations on how they can fire people, requirements for "fairness" in compensation, etc., those provisions don't actually help employees; they make us all poorer by reducing overall productivity, so while the relative position of some people might be improved, in absolute terms they are still worse off, like everyone else.
I fundamentally disagree with most everything you said. Worker protections do not reduce productivity, this is a typical talking point of employers who only seek to reduce costs of employment, at the expense of employees.
Even if it increased productivity, without regulation protecting employees the profits of that increased productivity are all harnessed by the elites who own the capital, and the workers are all poorer because of that.
If regulatory capture in labor protections was a thing, the large companies would pressure for strong labor protections, instead of always rallying and lobbying against thoae
To the extent that they protect workers who are genuinely productive, of course they don't reduce the productivity of those workers.
But to the extent that they protect workers who aren't genuinely productive (by making them harder to fire, and more generally making it harder to reduce their impact), they do reduce overall productivity.
> without regulation protecting employees the profits of that increased productivity are all harnessed by the elites who own the capital
If you believe the story that's being told about the last four decades or so, this was happening with regulations protecting employees all over the place. So if those regulations are supposed to be preventing it from happening, they're not working.
Perhaps we need stronger regulations and more aggressive taxation on the top of the chain, instead of more lax rules that would allow the elites to more freely harness the benefits of any increased productivity.
Perhaps we need to stop believing that government intervention can solve problems. The elites taking most of the benefits of increased productivity, to the extent that it's happening, is happening because of government regulations, not in spite of them. Government regulations make it much harder for people to start new businesses that could out-compete the existing ones. Much of the reason that large corporations dominate so many industries is not economies of scale--they are actually less productive than multiple smaller businesses producing the same goods or services would be--but the fact that only large corporations can afford to absorb the costs of regulatory compliance.
> I have a lot less faith in corporations, businesses and entrepreneurs than you do.
I didn't say I had lots of faith in those entities. I just have even less faith in governments. Given the respective historical track records, I think that's reasonable.
> Those entities only goal is generating ever increasing profits, all else be damned, no matter the harm they cause to society and employees.
Some corporations, businesses, and entrepreneurs are like this. But many are not. The problem is that the ones that are like that are the ones who benefit the most from government regulations.
Also, your implication is that governments have better goals, like respecting people's rights--but those goals are an even worse description of what governments actually do, than your jaundiced description above is of what most corporations, businesses, and entrepreneurs actually do.
Not really. I think you would be surprised if/when you cross over to the side of being an employer or maybe even a hiring manager. Its a different job sure (being the employer or directing work) but you and the people doing the work can choose to have an adversarial relationship or a cooperative relationship
... I'll let you take a guess which companies generally do better.
That sounds better for the employees since you can see what others at competitors are earning, so you can ask management to either bump you or you'll go offer your time somewhere else.
If the company is committed by law to honoring a published salary range, it can't make a private exception for you even if you can show them that you bring more value to the table. That reduces your bargaining power.
That's a good thing. Individual bargaining over compensation is only good for those individuals who happen to be good at bargaining, not for the employer nor the other employees. Most of us never have to dicker about money in the course of our work, so it's not actually a skill worth paying extra for; an employer who nevertheless pays a premium for good bargainers it doesn't need will conversely tend to undercompensate everyone else, which is bad for cohesion and retention.
How is this compatible with EUs relentless focus on privacy? What if I don’t want my colleagues or even people outside of my company to know how much I earn?
I'm from Europe. I don't have to pay taxes from RSUs before I have actually sold the stock, even if it's vested and neither do I have to pay any taxes on options until I have made actual profit from them.
But yes, I do wonder if it will direct a lot of negotiations into the more "benefits" section of the thing.
My understanding is startups try to minimize 409A value as much as possible while staying within IRS rules. The market value of options, if it were possible to sell them on the open market, would be higher.
I don’t know what the equivalent concept is in EU countries (or if there even is one).
Hate to be pedantic but it's European Union or European Parliament, not Europe. And it's a directive, not a law.
Also, "Employees Will Know How Much Their Colleagues Earn" is a false claim as this only reports salary ranges for the function and the average salary.
2026 is only for the Spanish implementation of this directive. And for Spain, it's only large companies that need to provide it by then.
That's not cynical at all, just misinformed about what the difference is between the two.
Laws are created by member states themselves, directives are the "goals" EU sets for the member states. Consider them "specifications" for the members to deal with the implementation of those specs.
Price transparency being a necessary condition of efficient markets is taught in microecon 101. The only reason prices are not transparent is because someone wants to (or thinks they are) profiting from the inefficiency in the market.
Sometimes transparency can backfire and result in strict schedules of salaries that prevent government agencies from hiring the best talent. It also results in everyone being given standard pay and promotions being based on time in the team, instead of paying for performance. These behaviors make it easier for managers to avoid difficult conversations but also make public agencies perform poorly.
EU companies often post salary ranges but they are often something ridiculous like 50-100K EUR, which makes this law potentially useless unless it also enforces companies to post their actual ranges.
But also different people can have very different effectiveness and productivity even at a same role, it can be a huge multiplying difference. How would you handle that aspect fairly?
I've always considered salaries not being public to be better for me because historically I've been able to negotiate well when we get to that stage, but I know that this isn't the case for everyone. I am also aware that employers can pay for previous w2 salary info (assuming the company used a major payroll provider)... and there are other strategies that companies use that gives them an edge in negotiations... but for the most part it seems like making salary info public really only hurts employees at lower compensation levels and will reduce income because the negotiation step will go away. That is workers will no longer be able to benefit from asymmetric information.
It seems like people view this as a progressive measure that will help workers, but I don't see it that way at all. I think it will help SOME workers but the most competent, resourceful workers.
What am I missing? Why are governments (e.g. Colorado, EU) wanting to enact these sorts of directives?
You're assuming you're negotiating well, but what if more info just raises the floor for everyone? How do you even know you're negotiating well, if you don't know the baseline? I'm curious if most people just think they're above average in competency, and also think they're above average in pay.
Will they make net worth, wealth, and equity ownership public? Doubtful, wouldn't want the proles to know how much the feudal elite own, just each other.
97 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadhttps://www.americanprogress.org/article/quick-facts-about-s...
(Texas and Florida notably do not, and likely won't for some time due to state politics; they are the second [30M] and third [22M] states by population, respectively)
I feel discussing salaries is quite common here. At work someone made a spreadsheet everyone fills their salary into if they want, experience, tenure etc and you can see how you compare. It's a great way of leveling the information imbalance that's normally there.
Edit: not sure why I'm down voted. I'm just saying how it is here, don't take it out on me if you don't like the concept, heh!
Every tax avoid-er tries to find deductions from nothing.
I don't want my coworkers to know how much I make because if I'm making substantially more or less than them, it will affect how they perceive and interact with me.
This isn't really an issue, as far as I can tell. I feel in general most people get paid fairly, so if you're doing the same work as someone else the pay won't be that different.
I've always shared and talked salary with my coworkers, both when I was earning the least and the most of my coworkers. When I earned the least, they helped me with how to approach my boss for a raise; and now when I'm the best paid, I help my coworkers get what they deserve.
Or assume you do 2x better work, they initially pay you the same, then you get a better offer elsewhere, and they would want to match, but if they do, you would be getting paid a lot more than your coworkers.
(Note though: I don't think many people acyually check each others tax returns, as that kind of already implies enviousness.)
That's a strange assumption to make. Of course I want everyone to be treated fairly.
> why should I be more loyal to some rich owner
It's not a matter of loyalty to some rich owner (particularly if I'm making much less than my coworkers[1]). It's a matter of getting along in the workplace.
[1] I have, and probably will again, taken positions where I was overtly underpaid because I was getting something else out of the job that I valued more than the money. But (at least in the US), people tend to equate your pay level with your skill level and value, so I certainly wouldn't want my coworkers to know.
I wouldn't directly check it, if they see that I have done so, but if I could have someone else check or similar, I would definitely get it checked what everyone makes. Not specifically because of envy, but it would just be a no brainer thing to do in terms of understanding the market.
Note though that while people in the nordics are highly individualistic, most would never even think about such an idea of screwing over their colleagues. There are good reasons for löneväxling, but this is not one of them
Wealth, Income, Calculated tax
Here's what it says for me (I've censored some stuff with ):
Born: 19** Wealth: 5** *** Postal code/area: **** Income: 4** *** Tax Municipality: *** Calculated tax: 1** ***
The lesser form of abuse would be for a shop to loop up how wealthy a customer is for targeted advertising. But it can also be used to see whose kid is worth kidnapping, and everything in between, like refusing tenants with low salaries.
Also, media gets everything and make lists. "This is what the soccer players make", "top 50 influencers" etc.
I don't think it's abused much. For wealthy kidnappings and so it's easier ways than to brute force names of potentials. Instead just look for CXOs or owners of companies that are doing ok (also public data). Refusing tenants with low salary is already done through credit agencies all over the world, this doesn't change anything in that regard either.
As for privacy: I guess you could say so. But as I said, it's part of the culture so I don't feel most people mind, and it helps us to get paid fairly.
A very amateur looking site too. Domain registered in 2023. Few Google references to the name. Can't handle HN load. The "About Us" contains a link to https://7bn.org/team , which gives a Cloudflare error and https://7bn.org returns a web hosting "Default Web Site Page"
And 50 upvotes while the site isn't even loading? Hilarious
Setting "showdead" to "yes" in HN profile settings is the red pill.
I recently triggered[0] some LLM-based robot, by mentioning poor air quality in India in scope of reported cancer rates. You can read the first paragraph of all these "[dead]" responses and you'll get the pattern.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41215564 (HN red pill - you need showdead=yes setting in user profile to see this spam)
I mean, even if it was entirely some random Indian poster with no automated assistance, which is still more than plausible, that speaks to a pretty shocking amount of dedication to shit things up that I usually only see on imageboards.
Then add in the obvious signs he tried to use AI at at least some stages, and that's where it gets actually wild to me, because if the posts were even slightly: - more coherent - less irrelevant - less duplicated - timed a bit further apart
I can totally see most undiscerning readers never assuming that was all one person or arguably less than one person with automation.
> {...} Given that the main objective of the measure is to reduce salary inequality, companies will have to make salaries or salary ranges for each position public.
In addition, they will have to share with their employees the criteria used to set these remunerations. They will also have to provide information on salary inequalities within the company, broken down by gender.
> {...} As of 2026, employees will have the right to request and receive in writing information about their individual salary and the average salary ranges of colleagues performing the same job or one of equal value. {...} In order to maintain competitiveness and privacy, the European directive sets access limits to the information, prohibiting the request of this information for purposes other than the defense of their salary equality rights.
[0]: https://www.fnv.nl/getmedia/89baa302-e76e-43da-a6f1-3eb983de...
Of course, this would never happen. In capitalism, fair competition is a given.
If companies treat employees as commodities, which is largely the case, they don't have to collude to suppress salaries. The basic economics of commodities is enough.
The only way for employees to really have any bargaining power is to not be commodities; but trying to do that as employees is swimming against a strong economic current, because companies who can't treat their employees as commodities are in a more precarious business position than companies that can.
In other words, if you really think you're being underpaid as an employee compared to the value you create, your best option is to stop being an employee and become an owner of a company. And as an owner, if you are going to have any employees, you are going to end up under strong business pressure to treat them as commodities, so if you don't want to do that, your best option is to not have any employees in the first place: the owners either do the work themselves or outsource it to the owners of other companies with contracts.
The relationship between employee and employer is fundamentally adversarial, and the employer has all the power in that relationship.
Don't. Regulatory capture is a thing.
> The relationship between employee and employer is fundamentally adversarial
In general, no, it is no more so than any contractual relationship.
However, to the extent that employees can be treated as commodities, that does add an adversarial element.
> the employer has all the power in that relationship.
Again, this is not true in general, but to the extent that employees can be treated as commodities, yes, that means their bargaining power is minimal.
However, this is not something that can be fixed by regulation, because, as above, employers, who, in the cases where employees can be treated as commodities, will be large corporations, can just buy the regulations that favor them. To the extent that they have to accept provisions that they would rather not have, for example minimum wage, limitations on how they can fire people, requirements for "fairness" in compensation, etc., those provisions don't actually help employees; they make us all poorer by reducing overall productivity, so while the relative position of some people might be improved, in absolute terms they are still worse off, like everyone else.
Even if it increased productivity, without regulation protecting employees the profits of that increased productivity are all harnessed by the elites who own the capital, and the workers are all poorer because of that.
If regulatory capture in labor protections was a thing, the large companies would pressure for strong labor protections, instead of always rallying and lobbying against thoae
To the extent that they protect workers who are genuinely productive, of course they don't reduce the productivity of those workers.
But to the extent that they protect workers who aren't genuinely productive (by making them harder to fire, and more generally making it harder to reduce their impact), they do reduce overall productivity.
> without regulation protecting employees the profits of that increased productivity are all harnessed by the elites who own the capital
If you believe the story that's being told about the last four decades or so, this was happening with regulations protecting employees all over the place. So if those regulations are supposed to be preventing it from happening, they're not working.
Those entities only goal is generating ever increasing profits, all else be damned, no matter the harm they cause to society and employees.
I didn't say I had lots of faith in those entities. I just have even less faith in governments. Given the respective historical track records, I think that's reasonable.
> Those entities only goal is generating ever increasing profits, all else be damned, no matter the harm they cause to society and employees.
Some corporations, businesses, and entrepreneurs are like this. But many are not. The problem is that the ones that are like that are the ones who benefit the most from government regulations.
Also, your implication is that governments have better goals, like respecting people's rights--but those goals are an even worse description of what governments actually do, than your jaundiced description above is of what most corporations, businesses, and entrepreneurs actually do.
You should also know that any information can be used to triangulate other information.
That’s exactly why people are focused on data privacy.
I’m also not outraged. I just think it’s a perfect example of cognitive dissonance.
Privacy is good in one case. The same privacy is bad in another case. Objectively they’re the same.
But yes, I do wonder if it will direct a lot of negotiations into the more "benefits" section of the thing.
I don’t know what the equivalent concept is in EU countries (or if there even is one).
Also, "Employees Will Know How Much Their Colleagues Earn" is a false claim as this only reports salary ranges for the function and the average salary.
2026 is only for the Spanish implementation of this directive. And for Spain, it's only large companies that need to provide it by then.
Laws are created by member states themselves, directives are the "goals" EU sets for the member states. Consider them "specifications" for the members to deal with the implementation of those specs.
Some places in Europe, peoples personal income, fortune, and tax, is already publicly available. But that is not true for the EU.
I've always considered salaries not being public to be better for me because historically I've been able to negotiate well when we get to that stage, but I know that this isn't the case for everyone. I am also aware that employers can pay for previous w2 salary info (assuming the company used a major payroll provider)... and there are other strategies that companies use that gives them an edge in negotiations... but for the most part it seems like making salary info public really only hurts employees at lower compensation levels and will reduce income because the negotiation step will go away. That is workers will no longer be able to benefit from asymmetric information.
It seems like people view this as a progressive measure that will help workers, but I don't see it that way at all. I think it will help SOME workers but the most competent, resourceful workers.
What am I missing? Why are governments (e.g. Colorado, EU) wanting to enact these sorts of directives?