The "best" part of the "The Work Number" is your employer can opt you in without any notification. The last time I worked for someone else's company, I specifically asked before I started if they shared my salary info with any credit agencies. The HR rep: "No we do not!" Guess what? They, or likely their payroll provider (ADP?) did.
I am now a partner in a consultancy. Despite my prior comments, we have still not yet gotten off Gusto. Pasted from a July 2024 e-mail Gusto sent me:
We are making updates to our Payroll Terms of Service to address relevant laws and regulations and include information about new products and features, including our new employment and income verification feature. The updated terms will go into effect for current customers on July 31, 2024.
You can review the full updated terms here.
The new employment and income verification feature
When your employees apply for loans, credit cards, or public aid they may be required to provide proof of employment and income and, as the employer, you often need to manually provide verifications during the approval process. With this update, you can save time and help your employees get faster access by automating employment and income verifications through our new partnership with The Work Number®.
No action is needed from you. This benefit is included in your current Gusto payroll subscription and there are no additional fees. As the employer, you can choose to turn off this new feature in the Settings tab at any time. The feature will be available on July 31, 2024. Learn more >
Thank you for choosing Gusto!
So my team, none of whom were ever explicitly asked for their consent to share their salary info, were about to have Gusto helpfully share it for them. Thanks Gusto!
I (angrily) opted my company out, but I'm probably the only partner in the company who would have gone out of their way to do that.
I'm not seeing how this matters, they were already doing that - the market is a big auction to work out the overlap between lowest salary employees will work for and the highest salary employers will offer. In that process employees also use data to figure out the highest salary that will be offered. The thing forcing employers to pay the salary they do is that if they offer less someone else will gazump them for the employee's time. It has nothing to do with the circumstances of the employees lifestyle. The lifestyle adjusts to the salary.
I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies.
I want to do the jump, but lack of courage, good ideas, sales skills and a very good salary still holding me back (open for suggestions).
But if the very good salary would go away, the scales tip instantly.
> I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies.
Building a successful set of tiny companies is very hard. Unless you get lucky with the exact right idea, execution, and market timing it’s really hard to build a single business that pays as well as our tech jobs do. Building multiple companies is even harder.
I think everyone sees the survivorship bias examples like the levels.io guy or a few of the app developers who got rich and thinks it must be easy because their businesses were simple. The indie hacker communities are filled with people trying to follow in their footsteps and not getting anywhere despite years of hard work. The levels.io success story is not something that is easily replicated because his signups depend so heavily on his huge Twitter presence, where he pushes his sites under the guise of friendly information sharing. People without Twitter audiences try all the time to replicate his success and then wonder why they’re not getting signups like he does.
It is. I am a fractional CTO running my own consulting business and I make 3-5x as much as I ever did working for one company. And all my clients are very happy.
People tend to think that income taxes lower your salary. While in practice employers know exactly for how little money (in hand) you are willing to work and in absence of income taxes would just pay this much less so that your money in hand is the same.
As an employee you should fight for income taxes to be as high as possible since they are neutral for you and might fund useful things for all. When left in the pocket of your employer they just become their takeaway. Employers won't spend it on improving the company if they don't have to. And the only things that force them to spend money in a predictable manner is regulation and markey opportunity to earn more. When they have those needs they mostly do it with credit anyways.
Conversely as an employer you should advocate for lowest income taxes possible for your workers.
It is not up to employer to tell me what to accept. If they lowball me, odds are high that I will just not accept it, or if I do, I will be sure to leave them as soon as I get a more reasonable offer, preferably in the middle of a project with no notice beyond what any prior agreement calls for. I will treat them the way they treat me.
Here in Sweden, your tax filings are public information; companies can just ask the government what you made last year. I have no idea if they actually do, though, and the data will be somewhat obfuscated if you have extra income on the side.
> … said the company “does not use algorithmic wage-setting tools to make compensation decisions for our employees or to set new-hire salaries.”
When the HR/CRM/ERP/whatever internal software has the plan to compute these metrics and they display it as metadata next to the people’s names, it’s hard not to curious « just to check ». Maybe it’s not in the company policy but you can never be sure of individuals actions (especially big corps as mentioned in the article)
What I find funny about this is that stories have been floating around for *years* about HFT/quant firms specifically hiring quants to work out what the lowest they can pay people in the firm is, and still keep them.
There was a story recently about how large landlords use salary data to raise rents. If they see you got a raise, they’ll increase your rent accordingly. And pretty soon, retailers will do the same. Your personalized price for a gallon of milk at Walmart will reflect your annual raise. I love living in the future!
Large institutional landlords use Equifax data, TWN, and other 3rd party financial tracking systems to dynamically price renters across the board; new rentals, security deposit, renewals, etc. These are pricing strategies insurance companies use to their advantage, often partnering with landlords to ensure they're getting risk-reduced renters.
Many years ago, back when companies could ask for your previous compensation [0], a hiring manager once said to me "don't ever lie about your past compensation".
I wasn't sure how they could figure this out at the time until someone later pointed out that many corporations do a credit history check on you as part of the background check. This gives them access to past compensation.
The information asymmetry here is, as with much of hiring, pretty bonkers when they had both the current and past comp history during negotiations when you have just yours. You might also have the comp history of your friends too (if you share) but that's still tiny compared to the corporations.
0 - this was in NYC where it's now no longer allowed.
An old neighbor of mine was a headhunter. He once told me that some companies had a trick to get around the law. Upon getting hired, you'd sign a document saying that you'd agree to all policies in the employee handbook. Pretty standard stuff. One of the company policies was that you needed to prove any previous salary you stated in the negotiation. If it was too far off, they'd just terminate you. The trick is that they didn't ask at all during the hiring process; you're already hired and onboarded and then HR puts a meeting on your calendar to explain the policy to you.
The information asymmetry here is ... pretty bonkers
This is why you shouldn't trust anyone who sells you on the idea that the ability to negotiate your own deals against large corporations is a feature and not a bug.
The information asymmetry, plus the difference in legal fire power & wherewithal to withstand a drawn out negotiation, will always put you at a disadvantage.
I'm skeptical. Credit checks don't give you an accurate picture of your compensation and it's not like they get your transactional banking history or tax documents (yet). Even with that it would be impossible to get an accurate compensation figure within 25%, so while I agree there's an informational imbalance if that's how you're negotiating you've already lost.
The information asymmetry is sort of wild to me. I can't really figure out an angle why this isn't bad for the same reasons insider trader is bad. I'm even okay with them having the info, I just think companies should be required to publish everyone's salaries. Redacting names is fine, but I should be able to look up the team I would join and see titles and salaries for everyone on the team.
Between this and algorithmic pricing, I envision a future where every penny of your finances is know to both employers and retailers, and together they ensure that you only ever have as much purchasing power as the "free market" decides you should have.
If your HR software is the same that does payroll and does hiring for your company and many others, it's almost garunteed a flag goes up when you apply to another job with a different company.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 65.7 ms ] threadFreeze Your Data - The Work Number https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
As I understand it, payroll whores your salary out to Equifax*, who then pimps it to others
* Yeah, that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach
If by doing this, can employers legally discriminate against you?
I am now a partner in a consultancy. Despite my prior comments, we have still not yet gotten off Gusto. Pasted from a July 2024 e-mail Gusto sent me:
So my team, none of whom were ever explicitly asked for their consent to share their salary info, were about to have Gusto helpfully share it for them. Thanks Gusto!I (angrily) opted my company out, but I'm probably the only partner in the company who would have gone out of their way to do that.
I want to do the jump, but lack of courage, good ideas, sales skills and a very good salary still holding me back (open for suggestions). But if the very good salary would go away, the scales tip instantly.
Building a successful set of tiny companies is very hard. Unless you get lucky with the exact right idea, execution, and market timing it’s really hard to build a single business that pays as well as our tech jobs do. Building multiple companies is even harder.
I think everyone sees the survivorship bias examples like the levels.io guy or a few of the app developers who got rich and thinks it must be easy because their businesses were simple. The indie hacker communities are filled with people trying to follow in their footsteps and not getting anywhere despite years of hard work. The levels.io success story is not something that is easily replicated because his signups depend so heavily on his huge Twitter presence, where he pushes his sites under the guise of friendly information sharing. People without Twitter audiences try all the time to replicate his success and then wonder why they’re not getting signups like he does.
As an employee you should fight for income taxes to be as high as possible since they are neutral for you and might fund useful things for all. When left in the pocket of your employer they just become their takeaway. Employers won't spend it on improving the company if they don't have to. And the only things that force them to spend money in a predictable manner is regulation and markey opportunity to earn more. When they have those needs they mostly do it with credit anyways.
Conversely as an employer you should advocate for lowest income taxes possible for your workers.
- $30k for anything that helps my community / humanity
- $100k for anything harmless that I just don't give a damn about
- 3 million per month after tax to work on weapons of war
Here in Sweden, your tax filings are public information; companies can just ask the government what you made last year. I have no idea if they actually do, though, and the data will be somewhat obfuscated if you have extra income on the side.
When the HR/CRM/ERP/whatever internal software has the plan to compute these metrics and they display it as metadata next to the people’s names, it’s hard not to curious « just to check ». Maybe it’s not in the company policy but you can never be sure of individuals actions (especially big corps as mentioned in the article)
I wasn't sure how they could figure this out at the time until someone later pointed out that many corporations do a credit history check on you as part of the background check. This gives them access to past compensation.
The information asymmetry here is, as with much of hiring, pretty bonkers when they had both the current and past comp history during negotiations when you have just yours. You might also have the comp history of your friends too (if you share) but that's still tiny compared to the corporations.
0 - this was in NYC where it's now no longer allowed.
This is why you shouldn't trust anyone who sells you on the idea that the ability to negotiate your own deals against large corporations is a feature and not a bug.
The information asymmetry, plus the difference in legal fire power & wherewithal to withstand a drawn out negotiation, will always put you at a disadvantage.
It seems like base salary would be easy to track, but other benefits would be much harder.
Truly, between this and feudalism, our ancestors have already figured out everything that's going to happen to us in this century.
https://www.workday.com/en-us/products/payroll/overview.html
I would not trust applying for any company with workday.