I'm all for allowing young prospective employees to ask for pay transparency. I'm equally supportive of allowing prospective employers to choose how to respond. After all, these two parties are engaged in an adversarial negotiation in the hope of reaching a mutually acceptable agreement. Over the years I've asked for some highly unusual concessions or stipulations from prospective employers and have been willing to provide extraordinarily unusual assurances and even certain guarantees in return.
However, I'm opposed to the idea of 'pay transparency' being the default norm offered upfront for all roles. It would be both odd and misguided. Odd because it's trivial to list real-world scenarios where harms will likely outweigh any benefits. And misguided because it won't yield the ideal of universal "fairness" it's proponents imagine. At worst, it suggests commoditizing all work down to interchangeable labor units, lets say, ditch digging. The linear-ditch-feet per hour achieved by Person A is unlikely to match the linear-ditch-feet per hour of Person B in cases where their experience, age, height, weight or BMI vary more than 25%.
At best, the idea seeks to enforce the unobtainable ideal of "equal pay for equal work." On the surface, this simple mantra seems so obviously proper, yet real-world evidence shows these situations are complex, highly dynamic and invariably full of case-by-case differences and exceptions.
However, I'm opposed to the idea of 'pay transparency' being the default norm offered upfront for all roles. It would be both odd and misguided. Odd because it's trivial to list real-world scenarios where harms will likely outweigh any benefits. And misguided because it won't yield the ideal of universal "fairness" it's proponents imagine. At worst, it suggests commoditizing all work down to interchangeable labor units, lets say, ditch digging. The linear-ditch-feet per hour achieved by Person A is unlikely to match the linear-ditch-feet per hour of Person B in cases where their experience, age, height, weight or BMI vary more than 25%.
At best, the idea seeks to enforce the unobtainable ideal of "equal pay for equal work." On the surface, this simple mantra seems so obviously proper, yet real-world evidence shows these situations are complex, highly dynamic and invariably full of case-by-case differences and exceptions.