Show Me The Money

This week: a proposed fix for misleading job ads. Also: some Google-style historical maps; and some baffling pizza toppings.

There’s a particular type of job ad that sometimes goes slightly viral. Scroll all the way down – through extensive demands for skills, lists of responsibilities, expectations of hours worked and so on – and you’ll find, hidden away, a tiny note that this is in fact an unpaid position. It’s a job ad for something that isn’t a job.

This is a problem especially prevalent in high prestige but underpaid sectors like radio – no one is going to work as an accountant for experience and exposure – but it’s been enabled in large part because of a widespread culture that you don’t really need to list a salary when inviting job applicants, and if anything it’s a bit rude to ask, actually. All too often, job ads content themselves with the words “Salary: Competitive”. Who exactly it is competitive for, they do not deign to explain.

And it feels (this is pretty anecdotal, but) like things have gotten worse: when I started out¹ 20 years ago, even badly paid jobs would generally tell you how badly paid they were. How much this comes from those hiring, and how much from the recruiters they employ as middlemen, I’m not quite sure. But the status quo feels perfectly designed to generate applications from people who employers can’t actually afford: it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

The British government is much in need of ways it can show the voters things are getting better that cost as little money as possible, though, so I’d been wondering if this might be one of them: make it compulsory to include a salary in job ads, and impose punitive fines on those who still post them without one. A relatively straightforward change, showing that government is on the side of working people, at relatively low cost.

What are the arguments against? There are a few I’m not convinced by.

It’s too hard to enforce. No, it’s incredibly easy to enforce: you probably only need to monitor half a dozen jobs boards. And if employers care that much and would rather pay the fine, this is not the worst outcome, it’s a payday for HMRC. I suspect behaviour would start changing pretty fast, though.

It would create upward pressure on wages, by telling existing employees that they’re not being paid market rate. That’s probably true! Strikes me as a good thing, though.

It would infringe workers’ privacy. This country is weird about money so I can’t rule out that people feel this way, but many jobs are on publicly posted pay scales, or are advertised with salary already, so I don’t see it being a big deal.

Salaries are commercially sensitive, though! I can imagine this being an issue in some specialised employers, like tech firms, at the upper end of the payscale: you could probably get around this by allowing a floor (“£80k+, d.o.e.”, or some such) as a code that everyone in the know understands as “possibly MUCH higher”. But there is absolutely no commercial reason for supermarkets or call centres not to disclose salaries: it’s just a way of hiding bad behaviour.

We don’t know what to pay! Sometimes you don’t! In some industries, in some places, there will be limited applicants and you don’t know the market rate; at other times you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find the person. But I don’t see why you can’t get around this by setting a salary envelope: if an employer says it’s budgeted for £60k but it’s only offering you £40k, that contains valuable feedback on both your market value and the attitude of your employer.

Again: I see no particular downside to increased transparency here.

There are other arguments I find less easy to bat away. Someone suggested embarrassment might lead to pay compression: on the one hand that sounds like a euphemism for “less inequality”; on the other hand Duncan Robinson wrote an unnervingly compelling Economist column about the damage done by ostensibly professional jobs whose salaries are now struggling to scrape past minimum wage. Alex Hern suggested that requiring more transparency in job ads could lead some sectors to simply post fewer job ads – industries like my own might become even more about who you know. That feels potentially bad.

And then there’s the risk of inflation. Raised wages might force employers to invest more in productivity raising measures, which feels like a positive step. But many of the biggest productivity raising investments aren’t in the gift of employers, but that of the Treasury, and it’s by no means clear it’ll make them. That must increase the risk of pay rises simply feeding into higher prices.

Mind you, if an economy is so weak that it could get a wage/price spiral out of a slight change to the regulation of job boards, you have to wonder whether it deserves to survive anyway.

Probably the biggest risk here, though, is that a critical proportion of the British public would empathise not with the applicant, but with the employer: that enough voters would see more red tape, not a cheap fix to improve people’s lives. This is infuriating. But I fear it might be the best reason not to change anyway.

Anyway, this is one of those times I’m trying to work out what I think by writing about it. Thoughts welcome:

Some baffling pizza toppings

Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada. Sotirious Panopoulos, better known as “Sam”, emigrated from Greece to Ontario in 1954, at the age of 20. By the early 1960s, he and his brothers were running a restaurant in Chatham which offered a baffling range of cuisines: burgers and fries, American chinese food, pizza. The presence of the latter in a restaurant already doing sweet and sour led Sam to experiment with the canned pineapple he had lying around, and the rest is history. Hawaii never really came into it.

The best variety of pizza has been in the headlines this week thanks to news that the proprietors of one pizza restaurant in Norwich hate it so much that they’ve started charging £100 for it. (Actual menu quote: “Yeah, for £100 you can have it. Order the champagne too! Go on you Monster!”) This was of course a publicity stunt. And the reason that it worked is that not everyone shares my obviously correct attitude towards the best pizza flavour: according to YouGov, while 82% of Britons like pineapple, and 84% of them like pizza, only 53% like the two in combination. (Given all the whinging, I’d expected it to be lower). If you are one of those who think that pineapple is a bit too exotic to go on a pizza, then all I can say is you don’t know you’re born.

Squid ink pizza: Having squid on pizza isn’t that unusual – you can even get it in Italy, where it goes by the name pizza pescatore. Making it the main meat, however, seems to be unique to Japan – as does mixing the ink with the tomato sauce to make the entire thing black and slightly fishy.

Smoked reindeer pizza: Big in Finland where, as I’ve noted before, reindeer meat is all the rage. The dish – which includes tomato sauce, chanterelle mushrooms and red onions – was invented by local restaurant chain Kotipizza in 2008, and named Pizza Berlusconi as a jab at the Italian prime minister who’d recently complained about Finnish food. Later renamed Pizza Poro (”reindeer”), although whether this was due to Berlusconi’s declining relevance or Me Too issues I’m not sure.

Banana and curry pizza: This one’s popular in Sweden – it also has ham and cheese – and feels like hawaiian pizza’s slightly madder cousin. Richard Tellström, a food historian at Stockholm University, credits it to a long-standing Swedish interest in Polynesian flavours, an enthusiasm for bananas in all sorts of strange places, plus unexpectedly, the influence of British Indian food. In this article in Smithsonian magazine he also points to…