Post Status Excerpt (63) — Pay Transparency, Mutual Respect, and the Community We Need

People don't realize how long ago "long ago" wasn't. We're not talking about two, three, four hundred years ago. My family always stressed working somewhere your employer respects you, because it wasn't that long ago they didn't have a choice.

Nyasha Green

We're rebooting Post Status Excerpt as a weekly chat between Nyasha Green and Dan Knauss (and guests—please join us!) about a few of the active topics and discussions in the WordPress community that we feel are most important. Big thanks to David Bisset in his former role as host and curator here, and also to our intern and post-production engineer, Olivia Bisset.

This week we're talking about pay transparency. Ny relates some personal experiences where an employer did not disclose pay or how employees were selected for raises. This leads us into a discussion of pay transparency in the hiring process — how it matters to everyone but especially job seekers who are black, indigenous, and other people of color. (Ny has written about this before, and Piccia Neri has been investigating the topic lately.) We also talk about how a lack of transparency can seem to emphasize an employer's distrust and an employee's disadvantaged position — and the effect that can have on a workplace culture.

Next, we talk about our own family histories which are touched — in living memory in Ny's case — by slavery and colonialism where work and dignity were extracted from some people by others with the power take their labor without compensation. Ny's great grandfather was born a slave in South Carolina in 1858 and lived until 1963. Dan's ancestors include German settlers in North Carolina who abandoned their earlier beliefs against slavery and began to practice it in the late 1700s. In the Americas and beyond, the past is much closer than we often assume, especially for BIPOC people. History only “bends toward justice” if people choose to bend it that way. It can also go the other way.

Finally, we close with how Allie Nimmons experienced a surprising level of hostility to a survey she presented to the WordPress community about the ways we contribute to the project and how we feel about it. There's the community we have now — and the community we need to become. How do we get there? What are the barriers? How can you help?

🔗 Mentioned in the Show:

• Piccia Neri started a discussion in Post Status Slack and on Twitter with a poll about job listings without salary ranges.
• Nyasha wrote an article for MasterWP, “Put your money where your mouth is: Why we need pay transparency in tech.”
• Nyasha's great grandfather, Jeff Doby was one of the Last Survivors of American Slavery.
• Historical trauma is carried across the generations in our genetics, according to researchers like Bessel van der Kolk, the author of books like The Body Keeps the Score.
• Allie Nimmons shared this contributor survey on Twitter and commented later on some of the hostile responses she got to the survey itself.

👋 Your Hosts

• Nyasha Green, Editorial Director at MasterWP (Twitter)
• Dan Knauss, Editor for Post Status (Twitter)

Every week Post Status Excerpt will bring you a conversation about important news and issues in the WordPress community and business ecosystem. 🎙️

You can listen to past episodes of The Excerpt, browse all our podcasts, and don’t forget to subscribe on Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, iTunes, Castro, YouTube, Stitcher, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, Simplecast, or by RSS. 🎧