Or a manager can give a decent raise to one person but then has nothing left for the others. Keep one, lose five. Does that help?

At most big companies you have to leave and come back in a few years to get the salary you should be getting. They think they’re saving money but they’re not.

It’s so easy to claim you fired someone for a different reason and so hard to prove you were fired for discussing salary. Of course everyone obeys these illegal directives.

Exactly. Our managers brought us in to a closed door meeting, told us that our paid holidays were being reduced to 6, and promptly told us if we discussed this on social media, our IT staff would “track us down” and we’d be fired. If we discussed our compensation rates with any employee in another office location of the company, including how much vacation/holiday/PTO we received, we would be fired. They flat out said it was prohibited.

Whether they are aware of the NLRB regs or not, that’s what we have to deal with. And as you said, litigation can be expensive, nothing is in writing, and faced with job loss, I suspect none of my coworkers would ever step up to corroborate the statements.

In theory it is illegal. In practice most employers can get away with it to the point the belief that employers CAN forbid you from discussing pay is pervasive. Litigation can be expensive, takes longer than a couple of mortgage payments, and will probably give you a reputation as problem child in your industry.

While working for seven multi-national companies I observed that HR staffers clenched the pursestrings tighter than even the financial controllers. The typical response from HR staffers for requests for promotions, out-of-cycle pay adjustments, and other monetary rewards was a very firm, “No!” I one time asked the HR director for the division, over 1500 employees, what options I had for retaining my key employees. He replied that traditionally how I did that was up to me. I asked for guidance and he basically refused to provide it. In my mind I was leaping across the table in the restaurant to put him out of my misery.

I’d be willing to bet that if Jane weren’t an employee; and, instead, were a client the company would have just eaten the “mistake.” Their thinking would be “well, we don’t want to lose this client.”

It’s illegal for a company to prohibit employees from discussing their pay with each other.