> Legislating salary transparency would be quite awesome actually.
I've heard they do this in one or more Scandinavian countries. Essentially, you can go online and see what your coworkers and neighbors earn.
I have a feeling that's why salaries in these countries, especially when you include state defined insurance and pension plans, are so normalized. It's probably also why more innovation tends to take place in the US (subjectively).
For many of us in the US, I think this would actually be a net negative, myself included. There is so much division in this country, eventually employers will simply be forced to dish out nearly identical salaries for everyone in order to avoid lawsuits and government penalties, even when talent and performance is radically different between employees.
For example, Employee X has a BS in CS from a great engineering school which took a lot of effort to obtain. He was hacking away at code on his own as a teenager and is passionate about tech, and is often working on open source projects on weekends and evenings.
Another employee comes in - she got a watered-down "Information Systems" degree from some mediocre pay-to-play online school, and her previous knowledge of technology is her IPhone and Facebook. She pays her tutition fees, does the minimum to graduate, and now has her BS, too.
She discovers the talented guy make 50% more than her, even though he's the guy leading the development projects, ensuring standards are met, cleaning up the garbage produced by other junior coders, etc. We all know that many teams form this dynamic, especially in typical contracting and enterprise shops.
Well of course she'll complain. They both have similar 'credentials' on paper, both work 40 hours, both are in their 30s. Management won't care that one dev is worth 5x the other, they want to avoid lawsuits and government penalties. So his salary is lowered, hers is raised. Because he knows he won't get paid what he's worth anywhere else since it's the same everywhere, he just stop performing at work, the whole project suffers.
And yes, this has happened in my work place several times in the last few years as salaries have become more transparent and there are more complaints from groups who feel that they're being discriminated against, regardless of their performance and experience.