March 16, 2010
By Laura du Preez
Contribute to the salary comparison project and find out whether your employer is giving you a fair deal.
If you have ever wondered whether you are underpaid, lend your support to a website that aims to break the silence about what we all earn.
The site, www.mywage.co.za, is part of an international project driven by a non-profit Dutch organisation, the WageIndicator Foundation. The foundation has set up similar sites in 46 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and those in South America and Europe.
The WageIndicator sites were the vision of Dutch financial journalist Paulien Osse, who nine years ago saw the need for transparency about salaries.
The main feature of the sites in the project is a web tool called the "Salary check".
The concept behind the tool is collective self-help. You can at no cost use the tool to check the average wages for your own or any other occupation. These averages are based on data collected from web users in your country who complete anonymous surveys about what they earn. While visiting the website, you are encouraged to contribute to the collective project by completing a salary survey to enhance the database for future users.
Data collected from the surveys is monitored and used by researchers principally from the Amsterdam Institute of Labour Studies at the University of Amsterdam under one of the WageIndicator’s other founders, Professor Kea Tijdens.
These voluntary web surveys can have problems, but the WageIndicator believes the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. If you are statistically minded, follow the "Research lab" link on the www.wageindicator.org website for more on this issue.
For the rest of us, it’s probably enough to know that information submitted in the salary surveys is put through a series of filters to ensure that it is genuine before it is added to the database. For example, multiple entries from the same email address are identified and eliminated.
South Africa’s site has been in a testing phase for about a year and it, as well as sites in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, Zambia and Malawi, was launched recently.
Osse, who was in Cape Town for the launch, says some 14 200 South African salary surveys covering 1 500 jobs have been completed, and information from these surveys provides the results for the local "Salary check" web tool.
The tool provides average wages, as well as the highest and lowest wage paid in 199 different occupation families. The tool tells you how many people in the same occupation family have contributed information that makes up the database.
When we checked the site, it rendered an average wage indication for a sample of occupations with the following number of "observations":
Journalist: 148;
General practitioner: 2 429;
Retail sector sales representative: 2 466;
Bank teller: 2 466;
Primary school teacher: 2 429; and
Civil engineer: 2 466.
Osse says some occupations may have the same sample size as others because they are in the same occupation family.
The minimum and maximum wages quoted with the averages indicate a range from very junior to very senior, but obviously this will depend on the data collected. This is less helpful if you want to know what people whose qualifications and experience are similar to yours are earning.
Karen Rutter, WageIndicator’s regional web manager for Southern Africa, says as the volume of data submitted grows, the "Salary check" tool can be adjusted to provide more detail.
Other sources of data can also be tapped. The "Salary check" tool on the US website PayWizard (www.paywizard.org), for example, gives salary data according to the state you specify and this is sourced from the US’s Bureau of Labour Statistics. A check on journalists employed in New York state, for example, rendered an average wage for 1 150 people.
Filling in the local salary survey will take a good few minutes of your time, but you are given an incentive to do so in the form of a prize: either a trip to Namibia or cash.
In South Africa, access to the internet is skewed in favour of white-collar workers. Perhaps that is why the WageIndicator Foundation has chosen South Africa’s mywage.co.za website to be the first to go cellphone-friendly. This should help to get less skilled workers to participate in the survey.
Other stuff on the site
Both the local website and those in other countries offer useful articles about wages and salaries, as well as articles on working conditions, labour standards, advancing your career and other work-related topics.
Each website has a journalist based in that country to generate the articles.
In addition, the websites have other valuable tools and some "fun stuff" aimed at attracting visitors to the sites.
The "DecentWorkCheck" enables you to find out how your employer measures up when it comes to paying the minimum wage, working hours and conditions of employment, such as maternity leave, health and safety, social security benefits and whether you are treated fairly at work.
It’s a great tool and at the end your employer is accorded a score, and you can view a summary of your responses to the questions and where these contravene or comply with national laws and International Labour Organisation standards. These results should help you, as an employee, to realise that you are entitled to a minimum wage, to a minimum amount of sick leave or to join a union.
One or two areas could do with a little more explanation. For example, on pension rights, the tool states only that pensioners are entitled to a state pension and that additional sources of income are required to make ends meet.
There’s no mention of the fact that if you have an income or assets that exceed a particular level, you are not entitled to a state pension. Nor is there any mention of the Pension Funds Act and the protection it affords those who contribute and/or whose employers contribute to an occupational pension or provident fund or a retirement annuity.
Informing employees and workers about typical pension arrangements may also be helpful to determine just how decent your employer is.
The Mywage website also offers a "Crisis test" that tests you on 10 key questions to determine how prepared you are to face the economic downturn.
The questions range from "In the last few months, have you bought shoes, mobile phones or any other items without checking the price first?" to "Do you use a credit card to pay for nights out at the cinema, bars, etc?" and "Do you save 10 percent of your salary in case of unexpected circumstances?".
In each case, the "wrong" answer is likely to indicate bad financial habits, but a case could be made for a prudent person to use a credit card instead of cash on a night out, as long as he or she can pay the bill in full at the month end.
The "Crisis test" seems to miss an opportunity to educate, with only a paragraph or two accompanying the results of your test and no guidance as to how to improve your situation.
Mywage also offers a "VIP/celebrities pay" link, which provides salary information on the famous and infamous, from David Beckham to Robert Mugabe. Mugabe’s monthly salary of R17 000 looks severely understated. The aim of this feature is to attract the curious, who will hopefully fill in a salary survey while they are on the site.
Check your mate
The most frivolous tool on the website is the "partner check". It is supposed to be "a light-hearted game that invites young women to explore the different economic, professional and personal scenarios that could arise as a result of the partner they choose".
The game begins by allowing you to choose your look from different hairstyles, facial features and clothes, presumably in the name of having fun.
Then you select your salary, your level of education and your age (up to 35 years). You then need to make your "choice" to be: with a man; with a man from another country; with a woman; alone; or alone with children. Each choice leads to two potential future scenarios – one positive and one negative for each of the "choices".
Maybe there is some food for thought in these scenarios, but perhaps it would be more useful to empower us to think more critically about decisions over which we have more control – our education, our career paths, when to have children and how to deal with life’s curve balls.
With the aim to have 500 000 users for the southern African sites within the next year, hopefully mywage.co.za will soon gather much more quality data that you can use to check whether you are being paid enough and how you could be rewarded for following a particular career path.
Don’t be surprised if you find your employer checking average wages in your sector on the site too.
And if you are considering enhancing your career and work-life experience with a stint of employment in other countries, visit mywage.co.za’s sister websites (follow the "Teams & partners" link from www.wageindicator.org for a list) to determine what you could expect to earn elsewhere in the world.
This article was first published in Personal Finance magazine, 4th Quarter 2009.See what’s in our latest issue
  
 
|
© 1999 - 2010 Personal Finance & Independent Online (Pty) Ltd. All rights reserved.