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Employers are using your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you’ll accept

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20260401139/employers-are-using-your-personal-data-to-figure-out-the-lowest-salary-youll-accept

Excerpt:

A growing number of employers are using surveillance wages to negotiate your next paycheck

Algorithms are increasingly using personal data to determine the minimum pay a worker is willing to accept, consumer watchdogs say.

You’ve likely already felt the digital sting of “surveillance pricing.” It might look like an airline advertising a specific fare bundle because a customer’s loyalty-program data suggests they’re likely to buy it, or a website charging more for infant formula because an algorithm sensed the desperation of a new parent.

We’re living in a world where your purchase history, browsing speed and even your ZIP code increasingly dictate the cost of your life. And as companies get better at collecting and analyzing personal data, they aren’t just gunning for the money coming out of your wallet - they’re controlling how much goes into it, too.

Experts describe “surveillance wages” as a system in which wages are based not on an employee’s performance or seniority, but on formulas that use their personal data, often collected without employees’ knowledge.

Companies already try to get new hires to accept the lowest possible wage offer. But while that once meant sizing up a candidate’s experience and credentials against the going market rate, it increasingly means feeding the candidate’s personal data into an algorithm.

According to Nina DiSalvo, policy director at labor advocacy group Towards Justice, some systems use signals associated with financial vulnerability - including data on whether a prospective employee has taken out a payday loan or has a high credit-card balance - to infer the lowest pay a candidate might accept. Companies can also scrape candidates’ public personal social-media pages, she said, to determine if they are more likely to join a union or could become pregnant. The data can be used to determine wage increases after an employee is hired, and the practice can veer into discrimination, experts say.

“If you’re a company who’s messing around with these types of practices on consumers, you’re watching how well they work,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank. “Workers are consumers, too. If it works on consumers, it works on workers. It’s the same psychology.”