Google secret salary

The search engine employee was angry with the leadership by opening the salaries of colleagues

In large companies, as a rule, employees do not discuss salaries - no one knows how even those who are sitting with them in the same room receive. The Google employee Eric Baker did not like this unwritten rule: she created an open table in which her colleagues began to make her own salaries. It turned out that employees were discriminated. The leaders immediately began to put pressure on Baker, she was forced to quit. Nevertheless, the sheet with salaries has been preserved, and with its help, employees are still achieving fair salaries.

One evening, Google employees corresponded in chat and discussed the salary. One of Eric Baker developers created a table in which her colleagues began to add their salaries. The document began to quickly spread in the internal social network. According to Baker, the data presented testified to “not too good things”, that is, inequality among employees (according to what basis, gender or racial, she did not specify).

A couple of days later, the boss called Eric Baker and told her: “Do you know what can happen [with you]?” “I knew nothing. You cannot punish the employee for publishing salaries, ”said the former employee of Google.

Baker's colleagues began to award her bonuses - in the search engine, any employee can award another employee with a bonus of $ 150 (she is paid with a salary). As it turned out, these bonuses are not directly received, the manager must approve the payment. The boss Baker, as a revenge, rejected seven such bonuses - only one reached, as the sender disguised the reason why he awarded a colleague. When employees found out that managers could reject bonuses, they were shocked.

The leadership was displeased by the distribution of the table with salaries. According to Baker, some of the higher workers with whom she used to communicate normally, stopped saying with her. As a result, in March 2015, she quit Google. Now she works in the Slack messenger.

According to Baker, at the time of her dismissal, about five percent of employees, that is, about three thousand people, indicated their salaries in the table. Employees use a document to seek fair salaries.

According to Erica Baker, she decided to tell this story after she saw on the main page of Google Dudl in honor of the 153rd birth of Ida Bell Welles. According to Baker, this indicates the double standards of the company: on the one hand, Google honors the memory of Wells, who fought for the rights of women and blacks, pays unequal salaries. “If Ida Bell Wells worked at Google, they would also collect meetings on what to do with her,” Erica Baker is sure.

All the tweets of Biker related to this story can be found here .