“Working from a narrative of,” means a framework or perspective. (More literally, story.)

Correct me if I’m wrong, of course, Patrick.

In my opinion, there is a number of reasons why the current approach with undisclosed salaries prevails, and it can’t be changed just by sharing that info. It’s more about changing what employees/contractors are paid for – giving up 40 hours of their life a week, or brining the value which can be clearly assessed and fairly compensated. I’d say there are quite a few reasons for the current state of the things (which doesn’t mean that I agree with that status quo, quite on the contrary):

* There are people with similar skills (or creating a similar value for the company) who would work for different salaries at the same company and be genuinely happy about that (yes, only until the know how much their equal-level-colleague makes).
* This works because after certain income level earned money don’t affect the level of employee’s happiness that much – better car, bigger house and other consumerism doesn’t really affect the happiness level that much (the best what you can buy with money is time and freedom, but this is again usually out of the employment paradigm).
* Undisclosed salaries approach is certainly more cost efficient for the employer and allows to attract a wider range of people: e.g. John for X, Jane for 2X and Justin for 3X compared to paying 2.5X to everybody and being able to attract only John and Jane). Even if it works only until the moment John finds out that he’s underpaid and successfully negotiates a higher salary it is usually still worth for the employer (at least that’s my guess, companies who chose openness say otherwise but they are still a minority).
* Employees put up with being paid differently until they find out that “the other person doing the same job” is paid more. When that kind of unfairness is discovered it significantly damages the morale, hence legal prohibition of disclosing salaries or the same norm imposed by culture.
* There can be a situation that a person paid X times more is X times more valuable for the company. The problem is that the most companies can’t really assess the value employee creates for the company (not necessarily absolute value, rather relative value compared to what other employees produce). This means that company can not justify the salaries objectively enough and prefer an easy way – the salary secrecy approach.

My guess is that you were able to achieve that great success with your consulting rates because you were able to show the absolute value you expect to bring for the client (supported by testimonials from your previous gigs) and, as you put it, by getting “closer to the money” in work you did.

Talking in terms of hourly rate just doesn’t make much sense for me. Actually, Patrick, can I ask you if billed your consulting clients by hourly rate, or it was rather for your internal assessment of how well you’d done and comparing different gigs?

But still I’m pretty sure that disclosing and comparing hourly rates or yearly salaries wouldn’t bring us anywhere – people are different, even the same person can have different performance and bring different value. It looks for me like a searching for the keys under the lamppost, because it’s harder to try finding them in the darker, harder to explore area, by which I mean building the organisational system where the value every employee generates is clearer, and substantially different compensations are objectively justified (by the value the person generates).