On Saturday, June 8, 2002, at 12:24 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> joanna bujes wrote:
>
>> Having lived in this country for forty years, I can vouch for the fact
>> that people will talk about anything (private sex lives, addictions,
>> anything) except for their salaries. Corporations don't have to work
>> very hard to enforce this; it's in the culture.
>
> As I wrote in a footnote to the first page of Wall Street: "There is a
> curious reticence about money, not only in economics, but more
> throughout American culture - curious because both the discipline and
> the culture are built on an obsession with money. Along these lines is
> R.C. Lewontin's (1995) observation that the only two questions in the
> famous 1994 survey of Sex in America that were asked in private,
> written form rather than explored in face-to-face interviews were those
> on masturbation and household income. American culture is almost as
> obsessed with sex as it is with money, but the obsessions are fraught
> with ambivalence and denial."
but friends who are freelancers/contractors often WILL talk about rates for particular kinds of work and with particular employers, for comparative purposes. it's one of the ways you know when you're doing really well or getting screwed, whether to push hard in rate negotiations or to ease up. within corporations, however, i agree completely that it's considered very bad form to ask someone's salary or to parade your own around (or to bitch about it, for that matter), except perhaps among close friends. even then, it's tricky. is there not something phallic about salaries? where's zizek when we need him . . . ;-)
j