Get Paid What You’re Worth

“No one will ever pay you what you’re worth,” Casey Brown says in the Ted video above.

An employee’s value is also highest when unemployment is as low as it is now – 4.4 percent in April – and employers are scrambling to fill jobs.

Why would an employer pay more than it has to? With unions all but extinct, the burden falls on individuals to ensure they’re paid fairly or well.  Low unemployment provides workers with more leverage to get what we deserve. Unfortunately, many of us are not good at negotiating how much we earn.  Or we avoid it entirely, because we’re uncomfortable with talking money – especially women.

Women “say things like, ‘I don’t like to sing my own praises,’ ” Brown notes.

One time-honored way to test the waters is to get an offer for a job you might like that pays more than your current position. If your current employer values you, they’ll increase your pay to keep you. It can be a risky strategy.  In our free-wheeling labor “market,” however, it’s also the best way to learn what you’re worth, because there is only general information about compensation for different types of jobs.

In fact, management researcher David Burkus argues that the U.S. compensation system is built around secrecy.  “Keeping salaries secret leads to information asymmetry … [and] an employer can use that secrecy to save a lot of money,” he says in another Ted video. Translation: a lack of information makes it easier to under-pay you.

Unions know this. Historically, unions posted compensation in the different job tiers in each industry so workers would know what they were entitled to.

In place of unions, Elaine Varelas, recruiter for Keystone Partners in Boston, suggested other places to get this critical information: glassdoor.com, job recruiters, LinkedIn contacts, and even human resources executives at friends’ firms who might provide you with salary ranges.

“People owe it to themselves to do their homework and stop hiding under the discomfort,” Varelas says.

So get out there and learn something that will definitely be interesting – and possibly lucrative!

Squared Away writer Kim Blanton invites you to follow us on Twitter @SquaredAwayBC. To stay current on our blog, please join our free email list. You’ll receive just one email each week – with links to the two new posts for that week – when you sign up here.