There’s like this weird culture around it where some may even consider it rude or too personal like it’s equivalent to asking someone their social security number or something
I’ve heard a rumor it’s because companies/bosses don’t want people to talk about their pay between employees because they may find discrepancies compared to their coworkers, but I’m not 100% sure that’s actually why since even their employees consider it taboo.
In: Economics
It is definitely a cultural thing and not uniform across countries, too – I moved to Norway several years ago and my Norwegian partner inadvertently offended another recently immigrated American by casually asking him how much he made at his job over lunch. Not a coworker or anything, just someone we were meeting with. It’s apparently not considered a weird thing to ask here, and in fact you can generally just look up what someone made last year publicly… but also, being part of a union is so common that even PhD students are in them.
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