Board finds Houston engineering firm unlawfully fired employee for discussing salaries with coworker

[MrModerate]

10. Interesting. In my company . . .

It's considered "bad form," and supervisors are prohibited from discussing their direct reports' compensation with anyone but HR and the supervisor's supervisor during salary planning.

The premise being that doing so leads to general unhappiness. Among individual employees, such discussions are discouraged but not forbidden. Also, salary schedules by grade are generally available up to the director level. You can figure out pretty much what your peers are making by knowing their grade.

As company owners, Directors' compensation is a deep-dark secret, but widely believed to be in the zillions. Which is actually OK, since we almost always promote from within and (for example) our current president of one of our major business lines started out as a document control clerk; another president started as a safety inspector.

So individual employees, if they're hot stuff, can aspire to the top. It's a significant element of our employee engagement/corporate culture.