#talkpay: can America's wage inequality be solved by sharing our salaries online?
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Version 0 of 1. Lauren Voswinkel is a senior software developer who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and she wants everyone to know that she earns $122,000 a year. This May Day, the international day of workers, Voswinkel is encouraging everyone to share their job title and salary on Twitter using the hashtag #talkpay. According to her, breaking down the social taboo surrounding people’s pay could not just help bridge the gender pay gap and give workers realistic expectations about salaries in their field, but also increase workers’ confidence alongside their salaries. Voswinkel first broached the idea of people sharing their pay during a lightning talk, equivalent to a five-minute presentation, at a conference last year. At the end of her talk, she publicly shared her job title and her salary and encouraged others to do so as well. About 20 other people shared their information with the crowd. “It had an amazing amount of feedback and reception,” Voswinkel told the Guardian. “This is the message that people want to hear and are interested in.” Reflecting on the success of the lightning talk, she considered turning it into a full-length talk, until Shanley Kane suggested that they publish a call to action on Model View Culture, a site of which she is the founder and CEO. The call to action written by Voswinkel was posted on 28 April, just days before May Day. Related: Unequal pay for women: 'I was told men should make more' Sharing pay information takes away the power from the employers and gives it to the workers, she argues. The information gleaned from the #talkpay conversation should not trigger emotional, knee-jerk reactions, but rather be used in a rational and calm way for salary negotiations in both current and future jobs. “The employer-employee relationship is inherently antagonistic,” said Voswinkel. “Employers are trying to make as much money as possible; by nature, they are trying to pay employees as little as possible while still having to be excited and dedicated to work at the company. So during negotiations they are offering the least amount that they think they can get away with.” By having clear expectations of salaries in their field or even within the company, employees are better equipped to make their case for better pay. Voswinkel used Twitter to share her information and start off the #talkpay conversation shortly before noon on May Day in New Zealand – when it was still be the evening of 30 April on the east coast of the US. I’m a Sr. Software Developer w/ 9 yrs. exp. working remotely from Pittsburgh, PA for a DC based company. I make $122k/yr #talkpay The call to action was stirring a lot of excitement and eliciting a positive response, Voswinkel said, just hours before she posted that tweet. “But there have also been a lot of people that are really scared of doing it, that are concerned that there will be retribution against people for doing this. That fear of retribution is one of the main reasons why I feel like this needs to happen,” she said. “If there are enough voices, if there are enough people behind it saying, ‘This conversation is something that needs to happen,’ then it will be much more difficult for a company to let somebody go for this type of a discussion, because of the attention surrounding it.” Voswinkel has vowed to begin a crowdsourced legal defense fund for those who may be terminated for participating in #talkpay. Mostly, however, she is counting on strength in numbers, hoping that companies will be too afraid of major public fallout to punish employees for participating. “Strength in numbers is something that is super, super important and integral about this entire push for visibility. It’s kind of a core of collective action,” she said. “The hashtag is left entirely ambiguous to encourage everybody to be able to talk about it. This can be women in tech. This can be men in tech. This can be people working at Walmart saying they have 10 years’ experience working in retail and make $9 an hour. It’s open to anyone and everyone who wants to actively share that information.” The fear of retribution is exactly what she believes is at the root of low wages and unfair pay. After she delivered her lightning talk, Voswinkel heard from people who discovered they were making less than the people they were managing. “This type of discrepancy is only allowed to exist in an environment where people are afraid to talk about this pay, and that’s the thing that I want to abolish,” she said. “I hope the discussion that happens after this is not the one of crabs trying to pull everyone down as much as it is people trying to bring themselves up or bringing other people up. “When I hear about people both in the [tech] industry and outside of the industry making $30,000 or $40,000 a year at a skilled job, I look at that and am like: How is that a sustainable amount to pay anyone considering how much housing costs, considering how much gas and food cost? It’s untenable,” she said. The stagnation of wages in the US for the past 40+ years and the fall of unions is NOT a coincidence. Collectivism works. #talkpay Her main hope for #talkpay is that it will push people to discover that other people who make more than them often have the same level of skill, thus giving them more confidence in being able to ask for more money. |