Employers strip wage information from recruitment

More and more employers appear to be exploiting pay secrecy to exploit job applicants. When employers don’t adopt pay transparency during recruitment, they place job seekers at a disadvantage during wage negotiation.

Employers wield unfair power during times of high unemployment and can use inequality to revitalize profitability and reduce the cost of production. Our free market economy removes workers rights to negotiate wages fairly to derive optimum economic benefits from their labour.

Unfair Employer Power Violates the Constitution S23.1

Labour markets are dominated by unfair employer and recruiter power. Employers are not upfront about pay but believe they are entitled to full disclosures about applicants’ and other employers’ pay. This abuse of power places applicants and employers competing for talent at a disadvantage.

Applicants don’t want this information to be handed to prospective employers who can use the information against them. If a former employer paid unfairly, a new employer has no right to use that pay to benchmark and limit an applicant. Employers must pay according to their compensation policy, not what other employers pay.

Constitutional Rights

Employers that don’t collude but compete for talent are not happy about their former or current employees disclosing sensitive compensation information to other organisations. For these employers and job seekers in general, the employers demanding pay slips violate the Constitution.

S23.1 of the Constitution enshrines labour market fairness, yet unfair employer power, called Monopsony, prevails.

The Constitution elevates fairness while the Competition Act must balance the interests of workers, owners and consumers.

It’s unfair and deeply immoral to sacrifice the sacrosanct worker’s right to fairly negotiate wages for the benefit of consumers and owners.

Some employers want workers to believe they should be willing to work for low wages if they are virtuous. Appoint Africa and NGO Help2Read to justify a lack of pay transparency by claiming they use unfair information advantages to verify a candidate’s virtue. Truworths says they use secrecy as workers overestimate their market worth.

People Solved, Kelly Recruit, O’Brien Recruitment, Nurturing Futures each obstruct a fair competition for talent by spying on rival firms competing in the same markets for talent. They demand pay slips or cost to company information in order to poach and price-fix pay.

Here’s the full swindlers list:

1. Anglo American
2. Auditor General South Africa
3. Appoint Africa
4. Bowmans
5. Callforce Recruitment
6. City of Tshwane
7. Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr
8. Competition Competition South Africa
9. Datanomy Solutions
10. East Coast Radio
11. Help2Read – NGO
12. Herbert Smith Freehills
13. Get Smarter
14. Kagiso Media
15. Kelly Recruit SA
16. Nurturing Futures
17. Peermont Global
18. People Solved Recruitment
19. Petra Diamonds
20. O’Brien Recruitment
21. SABPP
22. SANOFI
23. Smollan
24. Takealot
25. Transnet
26. Truworths
27. Webber Wentzel and Linklaters

Help advocate for fair