COMPENSATION

DAZI

CAN ANYONE TELL ME WHICH LAW, IF ANY, FORBIDS A COMPANY FROM CALLING ITS COMPETITORS TO OBTAIN WAGE RATES?

Don D

There is no law restricting a person from running a salary survey. This often involves calling competitors and others in the area or similar industries and trying to milk as much info as you can from them. You are free to make such inquiries. You may get 'blessed out' as they say in the south, but, you aren't breaking any law. Typically companies do participate in such surveys in exchange for a copy of the completed results of the survey. Go for it!

Theresa Gegen TX

The thing you cannot do, is agree with your competitors about wage rates (for example if two big retail stores got together and agreed that they would each pay store managers $35K a year. That would be anti competitive. (Just like price fixing would be anti-competitive).

Petard

DAZI,

If you're in a fairly small company and if your industry is not concentrated (meaning that there are lots of different companies in competition with each other), you probably can fly below the radar. However, more and more legal departments fear that the exchange of this kind of information by HR can be construed as a violation of anti-trust laws. The theory is that by exchanging these data, companies can somehow control or limit the "cost" of hiring people by holding down pay rates. Increasingly, therefore, we comp people in bigger companies are finding it difficult to obtain or exchange salary information with other companies.

There are some safe-harbor guidelines for acquiring salary data. You should hire a third-party consultant to conduct the survey. You should have at least five responding companies for each job you survey. The survey participants cannot be identified or identifiable in the survey data. In other words, don't assign and publish "company codes" for the participating companies. Display aggregate data only; do not list responses from individual companies. Display historic data only, that is, information that's at least three months old. If you're surveying same-industry companies only, it is risky to discuss your plans for future actions such as your upcoming salary or merit budgets.

Sigh. Sometimes I miss the good ol' days when we weren't so "sophisticated."