On the rise

It was no surprise that Lucy Kellaway, who has spent the past few weeks itemising the things that “bother her” about office life, should finally turn her gaze on our reluctance to discuss what we earn (2 December). But if salary scales constituted what one expert called a “massive taboo”, then the problems that underlay them were by no means clear-cut.

A third of the working population might be made miserable by paid employment and think the contents of their wage packet “unfair”, but the latest research seemed to show that they were quite as demoralised by being paid too much.

Armed with this tantalising information, Kellaway set off to Halifax and the premises of a wholefood company run as a workers’ cooperative, with a flat wage of £30,000 per annum (plus bonuses) and free meals.

“We’re nothing special at all,” a spokesman deposed, while offering details of a “multi-skills” ethos that encouraged commodity brokers to double up as pallet packers. His interviewer was impressed, but unconvinced. If you worked harder than your colleagues and were, in addition, better able to perform your tasks, then how could this egalitarianism be fair?

Much of what followed hinged on the question of “fairness”. Performance-related pay had its advocates, although the experts bemoaned its essentially subjective basis and the habit of employees rewarded for specific achievements to lose motivation.
Even less comforting was the news that, by and large, wage scales are not meritocratic. Height, a full head of hair and a deeper voice all played their part, as did having the cheek to ask for money – a feat which men are apparently much more able to pull off than more timid female counterparts.

If “salary transparency” offered one remedy, then so did the redistributive notion of simply paying the people at the bottom less. Dan Price, the youthful chief executive of the Seattle-based credit card outfit, Gravity Payments, had, for example, instituted a minimum wage of $70,000 (£46,400), in some cases doubling or even trebling the income of most of his staff.

Sadly, Price’s new-found status as a ­chat-show hero had not quelled a mini-revolt among workers who reckoned their own contribution could only be marked by better differentials. As Kellaway noted, we were back in the world of the famous New Yorker cartoon in which an employee asks: “If I can’t have a rise, then can Johnson take a cut?”