David.Poole (6/7/2015)
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I can think of three occasions where revealing the salary has caused immense damage. In two cases under performing individuals were being paid more than the highest performing individual in their respective fields. Good staff left when that came to light.
In another cases a high performing individual found out that they were paid far less than their peers and in some cases the people they were paid to manage. No one likes to be played for a mug and especially when they have their nose publicly rubbed in it by broadcasting salaries.
You could argue that the imbalance should never have existed but life isn't fair, get over it.
Aye, but to put it another way - for the sake of argument - "salary confidentiality is desirable as it enables people to cover up incompetent management". I do appreciate you'd never explicitly argue that to be the case, but this is largely what most of the arguments have boiled down to. And paying muppets more than good and highly productive staff is incompetent management, pure and simple and a significant risk. If you do this, you're going to get caught out eventually.
If you prefer a more rightwing argument against it, it's a form of market distortion, which is bad in and of itself, well, because.
I'm a DBA.
I'm not paid to solve problems. I'm paid to prevent them.