Comment by joe_mamba
1 day ago
>Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing?
No, it's a thing in most of Europe like France or Germany for unionized trades. All trades there have publicly documented salary bands based on education and YoE per job, where the negotiations starting point for a wage for a position must not be below the minimum threshold but also can't exceed a certain upper threshold. In some cases, the company can decide to place you outside the union agreed tariff/band range to give you a higher wage, but then you might be exempt from some strict union rules like 35h/week working hours and such.
And they cap the top end of the salary bands because the yearly budget for wage increases is a fixed pie for most companies, and so to have money left to give entry level workers the great wage increases as mandated for by unions, they need to cap the increases to the top wages to prevent bleeding/bankruptcy. Do you think all European companies have unlimited money to give all their workers X% wage increases?
This is how it works in Austria.
In Austria, salary is absolutely NOT capped by collective agreements. At a certain cap salaries are just not valorized anymore, that's all.
We here live in an eco-social free-market economy, where a company can pay an employee however much they want. In union terms, the collective agreements only regulates the minimum an employer has to do.
In Finland we have salary bands for some jobs, but it's usually just the minimum. Some have a maximum, but there are always "personal bonuses" the employer can give on top of that. But these are usually "old" professions like teachers, nurses, factory workers.
For IT jobs I haven't seen an official salary band anywhere and there basically is no union mandated maximum and the minimum is mostly a suggestion.
We also get universally negotiated percentage raises every now and then, but it's like 1-2%. Personal raises are on top of that and can be a LOT more.
The maximum cap sounds just stupid. When you hit the limit, why would you do anything past the absolute minimum to stay at that level?
> The maximum cap sounds just stupid.
Conceptually unions are a democracy and people are selfish. Why should I let some other worker make 10x what I do when I can instead have them make 1x and spread out the other 9x around including to me?
This "spread it around" sounds like some trickle down ecodomics madness to me =)
If the company can't pay more to a high performer they surely won't just give thast money to the average folks. It'll just go to C-staff bonuses and conference trips to exotic countries.
(Provided that the average performers are above the union minimum already)
4 replies →
You realize this sounds like you being selfish? You’re taking merit out of the equation, looking to take from others, so that you get more.
> No, it's a thing in most of Europe like France or Germany for unionized trades.
This is how it often works even without unions. Everywhere I worked there were salary ranges you can't go out of without changing the role, and I was never in a union.
The minimum wage thing in France is true but it's so low for developers that it doesn't play any role in salary négociation.
Never seen any upper threshold except just what the company décides.
By law people with the same job and same qualification etc in a company must earn the same thing but that's theory more than practice, except maybe large companies.
Also being in an union or not does not change anything.
Same in Germany. That's why usually Max Mustermann (55) get's a better compensation for doing bare minimum than you for doing more work.
But in case of layoffs you will be kicked out first and he would be kicked out the last and with a far better severance package.