That's why it's "legal tacit collusion" when one leading law firm announces salary increases and other law firms immediately match it: https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/large-law-firms-...
That type of salary matching has been happening for decades.
What's illegal is competitors making agreements with each other to set wages -- via secret emails, etc.
The law firm example seems imperfect though. Publicly announcing that you’re raising salaries isn’t really the same as internally sharing that data and choosing to set the same salary based on that.
How am I ever going to realistically negotiate salary vs a company that has this level of information (even during performance reviews)? And frankly something that worries me is, what level of data are they getting? If it’s tied to your HR system, does it get anonymized performance reviews? If every company can perfectly profile me and place me in an expected salary, I as the employee give up all my power. That’s strictly bad for me
Sharing compensation data across companies doesn't necessarily mean wage fixing. Company A can use the compensation data from Company B to try and compete better for talent.
Not saying thats what it will be used for, but it's technically not wage fixing.
You're missing a lot with your second point though. If a company has excellent salary data and can put in you a band, then it also means that you have better grounds to argue for raises when you gain experience, or argue if you are underpaid, or even find jobs at companies who intentionally pay a higher percentile to market as a way to attract better talent.
In contrast, if we all operate 100% blind with no data, as many here seem to want, it would lead to all sorts of unfair wage situations with people doing equivalent jobs earning vastly different amounts. This sort of environment is biased towards more aggressive people who have strong social skills when it comes to negotiation. In fact, you see exactly this when companies choose not to buy data like this to set their bands.
On the second point, I would argue that you have very little ability to determine when you’ve gained enough experience as an employee to argue for a raise. Whereas an employer with access to Pave has a _ton_ of ability to determine whether you have or have not. Yours is based entirely on personal experience and feel, plus maybe talking to a few coworkers. Theirs is based on aggregated data from thousands of employees