Salaries for the same role at Twitter can vary by as much as 225 percent, depending on where in the world employees are, according to internal data compiled by the company and viewed by Input.
The information comes from Twitter’s Salary Range Dashboard, which allows Twitter staff to see what employees are paid in each role at each location across the company. The data – which is labeled “Twitter Confidential. For internal use only. Do Not Distribute” – is current as of April 2022.
“A manager in the UK is being paid less than someone who would manage in the US, and of course, offices outside the UK and US are being paid terribly,” says a non-US Twitter employee who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the data.
Surprisingly, such discoveries – are reported publicly for the first time by Input — many lower-paid Twitter workers are fed up and considering employment elsewhere. (Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.)
of salary issuesinstead of the Musk drama, have been fOCUS the attention of many employees from the inside.
The panel, released in the spring, was slightly delayed due to news of an attempted takeover of the social media platform by Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk. The anonymous Twitter employee says pay issues, not the Musk drama, have been the focus of many employees internally. “Elon kind of feels like a nuisance,” they say.
Salary data is divided into minimum, medium and maximum amounts. “It’s not like, ‘You can get paid between $10 and $20,'” says the anonymous Twitter employee. “It’s, ‘Somebody gets paid $10 in this role, and somebody [else] $20 is paid.”
Examples of large pay differences include directors of legal counsel (a Level 8 position) earning a maximum of $338,000 in New York, compared to $203,000 for the same role in the UK; curation leads (a level 6 role) earning a maximum of $226,000 in San Francisco, compared to A$216,000 ($149,000) in Australia and 1,330,000 pesos ($65,000) in Mexico; and data specialists (Level 3) who earn a maximum of $51,000 in the UK, compared to GHS 128,000 ($15,600) in Ghana.
Due to the global nature of Twitter, once a change is complete, staff members in one geographic location will often pass the baton to their equivalent position in another country – meaning someone they know gets half of someone else’s amount at the same level are likely to interact with their higher paid equivalent every day.
Input has heard that staff in Ghana are particularly concerned about being paid relatively less than their peers and many are looking for higher paying roles outside the company.
“It’s a very big gap,” says Stefan Stern, visiting professor at Bayes Business School (formerly Cass), City, University of London. Stern compares Twitter’s approach to headlines at the start of the pandemic, saying Facebook was looking to cut wages for workers who chose to leave the San Francisco Bay Area when remote work became possible.
Ignored questions
Questions about why there is such a disparity in pay for the same job are constantly raised in meetings – and ignored by leaders and managers, staff claim.
“The company released the salary dashboard with the caveat that they were doing it for transparency, but with no intention of changing the huge salary discrepancy,” says a second Twitter employee, who is also based outside the US According to them, the company said. that the difference was not based on the cost of living in each country, but what the average salary was in each area.
The inaction was partly due to a desire to maintain the status quo, according to the second employee, which would benefit US-based executives. “U.S. senior management doubled down on the fact that there was nothing they could do to correct the discrepancy, which was to be expected since they benefited the most from it,” they say.
“StaFF members left feeling that they they were not heard and are undervalued.”
“Whistleblowers have done us a service in finding out what the disparities are already,” says Stern, who acknowledges that it has long been understood that some wages in certain jurisdictions may be higher than others. “But the idea that two human beings in different places doing similar work should be paid differently simply offends the basic meaning of work and human dignity.
“There’s cost savings and then there’s something that looks outrageous,” he continues. “That’s the argument for pay transparency: You might be able to avoid some of these worst excesses by turning shame into conversation.”
In a recent meeting between senior management and staff, members of leadership were defensive when asked about the wildly different compensation levels, according to the second Twitter employee. “Staff members left feeling unheard and undervalued,” they say.
Their next step seems clear: “Many of us decided at that point that we needed to look for another job.”
UPDATE 7/19/22: After this story went to press, a Twitter spokesperson released this statement: “Twitter regularly evaluates compensation in each market where our employees are based to ensure that we pay equitably and remain competitive in the market. Compensation for each role is localized depending on the location and our approach ensures we are competitive against local market practices.”
