pay secrecy

Jessie is in her first job and while she would never refuse a good job with prospects because it was low paying, she is very upset to learn that she is being paid lower than team members doing similar work and she is especially upset because some of these people lack her educational qualifications.

"Sometimes," says Jessie, "you can be in a job for months if not years before you discover that a team member is earning more than you are and when all things are equal - which they mostly are - you wonder why management allows this unfairness to happen."

How Jessie discovered she was earning less pay than a team member is one of those grey areas that we all wonder about. She didn’t go looking for evidence. She had no idea she was receiving less pay until Fate stepped in her path.

"I accessed the other guy's personal folder on the network to get a document I needed and saw a sub-folder called 'pay slips', explains Jessie. "Okay, it was probably not the right thing to do but it was on a team network, the personal folder was not locked and it contained many documents that needed to be shared."

Jessie felt that something as personal as pay slips shouldn't be on a network shared by all, so she felt that it had fallen into her hands for a reason and sure enough it had!

The other guy was earning $5K more than she was and she was understandably furious because he had no educational qualifications and had started about the same time as she had.

Jessie is aware that when people start jobs there is sometimes a weird clause in their contract stating words to the effect that you are not to discuss your salary with team members.

This is obviously a situation where team members are going to be earning more, or less, than their colleagues doing similar work, and in Jessie’s book of ethics it is a nasty practice.

"I would not have accepted the job had this sort of thing been in my contract," says Jessie.

"I am aware, too, that at interviews some employers will sometimes ask outright: 'What are your salary expectations?' They are perfectly aware of the going rate for your skills, and so are you, and when this happened to me when I was job hunting I refused to play their game."

"I told them that I expect to be paid a salary commensurate with that paid to other members of the team," says Jessie. "In doing so, I made it plain to them that I expect no more or no less than others doing similar work. Also, I am encouraging the employer to be ethical."

To Jessie, companies that enforce 'salary secrecy' clauses in contracts are dividing and conquering the team. Such clauses drive a wedge between team members, negating the whole purpose of putting people in teams.

"I believe in equal pay for equal work, and I do not believe it is ethical for companies to pay workers more, or less, than their colleagues doing equal work depending upon how assertive they are at interviews."

"I believe that people who have spent four year at university gaining qualifications deserve more pay than people who haven't," says Jessie. "But when the work is equal - as in my case - it didn't matter. I was simply angry and humiliated that I was getting less."

At her present workplace, Jessie did not go through that "What are your salary expectations?" question at the interview. The salary for the job was included in the advertisement. It was fixed, and Jessie accepted it as a fair salary.

The guy who was earning more than she was had started on the team a few months earlier, so either he had asked for a higher salary at the interview or it was offered to him.

"No job gets downgraded $5K in three months," says Jessie. "Something very wrong was going on here."

As Jessie points out, workplaces are where you make lifelong friends. You often spend more time with your team than you do your family, and good relations with them are thus imperative.

"If you discover you are earning more than a team member doing equal work," says Jessie, "you may be pleased but you will also feel uneasy wondering whether someone else in the team gets more than you do!"

It is not a good situation to be in. And a far worse situation would be discovering, as Jessie did, that you are earning less than a team member.

Jessie has now been placed in a tricky situation.

If she complains about receiving $5K less than her team member, she will have to admit that she looked at his private file. She does not feel happy about making this admission - but by the same token she feels that she was given the opportunity to look at his personal file for a reason.

That reason, Jessie feels, is to assess whether she wants to stay in her present job knowing that her employer is guilty of treating her unfairly.

Jessie can ask for a $5K raise without mentioning her team member’s salary, or she can look for another job.

"Funny thing," sighs Jessie, "I was perfectly happy with my salary before I discovered I was being paid less than someone else."

keeping things together

Like all women, Hope has come a long way since the 1960s but she, being a single mom, knows from personal experience that having it all is an unrealistic expectation and that the most a single working mom can do is keep things together at home and survive as best you can at work.

"I know that some moms - single and married - manage to beat the odds," says Hope, "but most of us are forced to make huge career sacrifices for the sake of the children and take on some pretty nasty humilation, too. But you do it to survive!"

When her children were young, Hope believed it was far more important for her to keep it all together at home than to strive for power and glory in the workplace for the simple reason that she represented home to her children. There was nobody else but her to keep things together at home, and if she lost the love and trust of her children then she would lose everything.

"A lot of working moms just don’t realize that their children play a far more important role in their lives than the women think they do," says Hope, "Children keep us grounded far more than a job does."

"I saw it as my duty to give my children the very best start in life and the best start has very little to do with money," says Hope. "Instead, it has everything to do with the time and care I gave them and most of all the blessing of a loving, stress-free home environment."

"To achieve that aim I took on the least stressful job I could find," says Hope, "and no matter that I was being paid half as much as I was worth I hung on to that job for dear life because it was giving me what I wanted. I jumped through a hundred hoops a day to keep my boss happy because as long as he was happy he wouldn't fire me and upset my homelife."

"I believe that the first seven years of a child's life are vital to his or her future development," says Hope, "and I have no regrets about the enormous personal sacrifices I made for my children. I was aware right from the start that no amount of remorse will ever undo the damage done to kids by a mother who neglected them in order to further her career, or to chase a guy."

To her credit, Hope’s three children have grown up into happy, well-adjusted teenagers and while life is much easier for her there are still significant responsibilities with teenagers living at home.

"I'm still in the same job," laughs Hope, "and I'm still keeping it together at home.

"Support is something I never really got in large enough measures to improve my circumstances," says Hope. "Being a father and a mother to young children was relatively easy, but its hard being both a mom and dad for older children. They still depend upon me to provide a safe, stable and happy home, and because I don't want to rock their boats I'm still jumping through hoops for my boss."

"The demands of my job no longer conflict much with my mothering duties," says Hope, "so life is easier in that respect, but my boss never lets me forget how much time off he gave me when I had to put my little children's needs first."

"When a conflict between work and home arose, I always stuck to my guns about never letting work interfere with my home life," says Hope, "and my boss was pretty good about giving me time off to keep things together at home. And so he should have been for paying me half as much as I was worth!"

"The belief that I can have it all when the kids were older kept me sane during those early years," says Hope, "but I'm discovering that I probably won't be able to achieve that goal until my kids are working themselves."

"Until then, I guess I'm still stuck in this low paid job," sighs Hope. "I'm surviving, sure, but I'd like to be thriving!"

"I can't understand mothers -- married or not -- who put their kids into nurseries after birth in order to pursue their careers," says Hope. "Maybe I'm missing something but why bother having children if you’re not prepared to look after them?"