You’re so money
Gone are the taboos around talking about wages
Tyler Olsen
For years, like Aunt Gladys’s moustache or Uncle Hank’s first wife, wages were one of those things you just didn’t talk about. But now that taboo is being discarded by a young workforce that has no problems telling partners, friends and, heck, probably even partners’ friends’ roommates how much they make.
As Sheena Goodyear, the 23-year-old editor of Memorial University’s student newspaper, the Muse, explains, “The thought of keeping wages a secret would never come to mind. When someone gets a new job, one of the first questions I think to ask is how much it pays.” That attitude is an about-face from the days of yore when conversation about wages was only slightly more common than talking about your latest sexually transmitted infection.
As far as Toronto employment lawyer Daniel Lublin is concerned, the shift in attitude correlates to young workers’ belief that they deserve a bigger paycheque. Their pay, adjusted for inflation, has tumbled from 30 years ago, when union manufacturing jobs abounded. For some, openly discussing their pay might seem like a technique to prevent wages from dropping even lower.
University of British Columbia business professor Nancy Langton, meanwhile, sees young workers’ willingness to talk about income as part of a trend toward greater openness, something that social networking websites such as Facebook have facilitated.
“I think people in their 40s and older were raised to be somewhat more private and discreet,” she explains. “We see much less emphasis by today’s teens and twentysomethings on protecting privacy.”
But in the eyes of some people, this is one taboo that shouldn’t be subverted. Personal image advisor Gloria Starr, who makes a living explaining the ins and outs of proper etiquette to clients, is taken aback by the trend, one that could be equated to bragging. “I think it’s in poor taste and not very good business,” she says. “You don’t talk about those types of things; it’s very crass and average.”
