I agree it should be done, but the main downside is that a single pay number lacks a lot of nuance. At companies with open pay policies, a lot of times you will see one person complaining that another person is making more than them, and then a long meeting has to take place where all the special skills of that other person are explained. Having to do that repeatedly would get onerous.
Also, it's bad for small business owners, because then the large businesses could see what they are paying and much more easily poach employees.
Edit: To clarify, I'm absolutely in favor of pay transparency laws. But any time you make a government policy, there are always winners and losers. It's always a balance between how much you're harming the losers and who they are. In this case, the losers would be the businesses and their owners, which is all that I'm pointing out. But I'd say that the employees should be the winners here, and I say this as a business owner myself.
For employees, working at a large company that has already achieved economies of scale is probably a better paycheck -- they have the budget to be able to pay you better.
For society, though, we definitely don't want those small businesses (which don't have the same efficiencies or economies of scale) to be boxed out by large corporations across the board.
Not that this means that we shouldn't have pay transparency (people can and should be able to make their own decisions), but the inability of small businesses to match the salaries of huge corporations is pretty unavoidable.
> Also, it's bad for small business owners, because then the large businesses could see what they are paying and much more easily poach employees.
I don't follow - to rephrase what you're saying, it's bad for small business owners because their (underpaid) employees will be paid more by (larger) other businesses?
Sounds like the employees of said businesses will overwhelming benefit if what you're saying is true.
This sounds like grasping at straws, I mean your arguments against pay transparency is that there would be some more meetings and that somehow this would enable big companies to easier poach employees of small business? I don't know where you work, but discussions about salary are such a small blib in the overall number of meetings, that even if (and that's a big if) pay transparency would increase the number of those meetings by a factor 10, it would hardly register for the vast number of employees amongst the flood of other stupid meetings.
And it would make poaching of employees from small businesses easier because they suddenly know about the salaries that they didn't have a clue about before? I don't know what you think the recruiters at of the big players do all day, I would bet they have very good ideas what all the other players pay. If anything it would help small businesses who don't have the money to pay top recruiters.
Also, it's bad for small business owners, because then the large businesses could see what they are paying and much more easily poach employees.
Edit: To clarify, I'm absolutely in favor of pay transparency laws. But any time you make a government policy, there are always winners and losers. It's always a balance between how much you're harming the losers and who they are. In this case, the losers would be the businesses and their owners, which is all that I'm pointing out. But I'd say that the employees should be the winners here, and I say this as a business owner myself.