An Employers Nightmare

 I once knew of a construction company that paid one worker $12.00 an hour and another worker $18.00 an hour for the exact same job.

Here is why:

Apparently the $12.00 an hour worker was an habitual alcoholic that had lost his license to drive and had to be picked up and dropped off every day. 

Sometimes he would go on weeks long drinking binges and then be at worked with less than optimum  performance.

The $18.00 an hour worker never drank and had his own vehicle and was very reliable and an excellent worker.

Management did not want to fire the alcoholic, they wanted to give him a chance.

The $12.00 an hour worker used to make more until managment realized that by lowering his pay he no longer could afford to take the weeks off from work on drinking binges.

 At $12.00 an hour he became more reliable and was at work without hangovers which actually improved his job performance and he no longer was such a safety insurance risk.

The alcholic got to retain his job and still meet his financial needs. If he made anything beyond his needs he would always go on drinking binges for weeks and be absent from work.

Imagine a couple of employees at your company create a spreadsheet that lists their salaries.

 They place the spreadsheet on an internal network, where other employees soon add their own financial information. 

Within a day, the project has caught on like wildfire, with people not only listing their salaries but also their bonuses and other compensation-related info. 

While that might sound a little far-fetched, that's exactly the scenario that recently played out at Google, according to an employee, Erica Baker, who detailed the whole incident on Twitter. 

 While management frowned upon employees sharing salary data, she wrote, "the world didn't end everything didn't go up in flames because salaries got shared."

 For years, employees and employers have debated the merits (and drawbacks) of revealing salaries. While most workplaces keep employee pay a tightly guarded secret, others have begun fiddling with varying degrees of transparency, taking inspiration from studies that have shown a higher degree of salary-related openness translates into happier workers. 

 (Other studies (PDF) haven't suggested the same effect.) 

Baker claims the spreadsheet compelled more Google employees to ask and receive "equitable pay based on data in the sheet."

This is not always feasible as the above construction worker pay story illustrates.