Do you want to know something about the bloke sitting opposite you? That’s right, him, the one who was hired last month. For the job that didn’t exist before and you regard as unnecessary. Who came in with the same title as you even though he hasn’t got anything like your experience. And is ten years your junior. Yes, that’s the fellow: spends all his time on networking websites. Well, the interesting thing about him is that he earns ten grand more than you. It’s true. Katrina in accounts told me. Her mate is having an affair with the MD and he told her. I didn’t want to upset you but I really thought you should know. I mean, it’s outrageous, isn’t it? If I were you I’d . . . Hey! Steady on! Whoa! You can’t just throw yourself out of the window . . .

Other people’s salaries, from David Beckham’s $250 million down, are a source of endless fascination. But what really intrigues, far more than the earnings of the super-rich, are the pay packets of our peers. Unless you are genuinely high-minded or have a private source of income and so don’t care, you know that this is true. And the reason it is true is that we are all so discreet, you might say secretive, about our salaries. We are desperate to know but we don’t ask and we certainly don’t tell. I’m feeling faintly embarrassed just writing about this taboo. What if one of the people I’m interviewing for this article asked me what I earned. I’d have to laugh nervously and wrap up the conversation immediately.

A new Channel 4 series, Win My Wage, which starts today, taps into this mixture of fascination with and mysteriousness about salaries. A contestant is faced with eight people with different salaries and has to try to deduce from their manner, body language and clues about their lives and attitudes who commands the highest salary. If he gets it right he takes it home with him.

Is this reticence about revealing salaries a curiously British thing? Certainly Americans are often quick to volunteer how much they earn and to ask you about your own salary. “There’s a cultural difference,” says the former head of a multinational company. “Everybody in the States wants to talk about their salary and their bonus. But if anyone in Europe told me what their bonus was I would know not to believe them.”

A colleague still fumes when he recalls an American bank manager asking him how much he earned. “I couldn’t understand why he needed to know and he couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to tell him.”

Today it seems to be hard-wired into us that it is crass to talk about how much you earn if you are well paid, and awkward to admit to being on a low salary. Those who plead poverty tend to be well remunerated but just cannot live within their means. Dorothy Rowe, a psychologist whose books include The Real Meaning of Money, says that “people will tell you more about their sex lives than you ever want to know but don’t want to tell you what they earn”. Salaries are “a very dangerous subject to talk about”, she says. “You either get envied, and that’s a disaster, or pitied, which is worse.”

She suggests that it is sensible not to go on about what you earn in a “world where money is so important and people are measured and their value is measured by what they have got”. If you don’t talk about it people will continue to speculate anyway and examine any clue, like contestants on Win My Wage, for evidence of what you might be on. Company cars can be a good indicator. But Rowe, who has a son working in the motor industry, points out that many companies now allow employees to pay to up-grade their company cars and so give the impression that they are on a higher pay grade than they are. One can’t help but feel that someone who operates like that deserves all the bad mouthing they get, followed by a brutal pay cut.

In the public services, pay structures mean that there is much less mystery about what colleagues earn, although the increasing number of employees on short-term contracts and consultancies means that it is less clear than it was.

In many fields of employment obfuscation is the name of the game. Authors don’t like to talk about the size of their advances, but they love it when people find out and let journalists play guessing games until they coyly agree that it would be acceptable to publish that they are receiving a “healthy six-figure sum”. Or they get their agents to leak the figures, accurate or otherwise.

Others whose earning power is widely known because of the sly efforts of their representatives are footballers. “It’s seen as a taboo for players to talk about their salaries,” says an industry insider. “The agents do, to drive negotiations.” Often the astronomical wages of teammates are leaked just as they are entering into pay negotiations themselves. Ashley Cole suffered a public relations disaster when he said that Arsenal were “taking the piss” because they were offering him only £55,000 a week. He could have phrased it better, but in his macho world he had a point. In the bizarre football market he was worth more than was being offered and he knew that if he took the money the football world would know that he had agreed to be paid less than others on his level.

In the City, basic salaries are a topic of little interest to anyone as the differential between individuals is relatively small. The focus is all on bonuses. One former City banker says he was told it was a sackable offence to disclose the size of his bonus. “Of course they say it’s because it’s not appropriate. The real reason is because there would be uproar – ‘that bugger’s getting more than me’ – and everyone would go mental. In reality everybody does tell everybody else and everybody does go mental.” The recriminations start because the differences in bonuses can be huge and the bonus is often not worked out scientifically but is in the gift of a boss who will use a range of measures to decide who gets what. One City lawyer says that “the boys do talk about it more than women, and blokes then say ‘Give me more because I know so and so is earning this amount.’ They are a bit more bullish and show-offy.”

“We need to create a situation where nobody faces disciplinary proceedings for talking about pay,” says Jenny Watson, Chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission. “While we have a climate in which someone can be disciplined if they talk to a colleague about pay, it is very difficult to close the pay gap. There is a particular problem around bonus payments. It is very difficult to find out if you are being paid your true worth.” She says that an open system would lead to clearer justification of bonus payments and employees would feel more comfortable that there was not unfairness. At the moment perceptions of unfairness, whether correct or not, creep into the workplace and these “are not helpful for the companies”.

Dr Joe Moran, a cultural historian at Liverpool John Moores University and author of Queuing For Beginners, says that 1920s human relations theories that workers would be more productive if they were consulted led to the American-driven trend for open-plan offices, first-name etiquette and relaxed dress codes. The working environment may have been friendlier but it left workers “less sure about their status and roles. In the modern office hierarchies and rewards are fluid and uneven, which makes it harder to talk about status and salaries.

Sally Brett, the TUC’s equality policy officer, says that lack of transparency is one of the reasons why we still have a gender pay gap 30 years after equal-pay legislation. There is still an average 17 per cent pay difference between women in full-time employment and their male counterparts, and she believes that this is in part because women do not know that men are being paid more. Openness would force companies to be more rigorously fair when they are fixing salaries and handing out pay rises. She adds that openness would be good for business because it would make people compete in an environment in which they knew that rewards were given fairly. “If bosses reward people on an objective and fair basis they shouldn’t be afraid of pay rates being widely known.”

Transparency is much greater in Scandinavia. In Norway the tax authority puts everybody’s returns on its searchable website. The British business development director in the London office of a Danish firm says he was astonished when he went to meet staff with a view to joining the firm. He was sitting in the open-plan office when the chairman came and sat down next to him. “He said ‘We need to talk about pounds, shillings and pence. At the moment your salary is X. What do you want?’ He knew that everyone was listening. I knew everyone was listening and we just launched into it.” He took the job and entered a working environment that sounds very alien to British ears. Once a year there is an “evaluation day” when everyone assesses each other’s performances. Bonuses are based on the marks given by colleagues in five categories: how much fun an individual is to work with, his supportiveness of others, sharpness, accuracy and the number of deals completed. Each is given equal weight.

The British development director believes that the system works because everyone helps each other in the knowledge that failure to do so will result in their bonus being lower. “Everyone is aware of what everyone else is getting and I think that’s quite healthy. Pussyfooting around is the British way. In Denmark they are much more open about earnings and salaries. There is no bullshit. Everyone is very direct and you know where you stand.”

As equality legislation is tightened there is greater transparency within companies but the pace of change is cautiously slow. In the UK directors of publicly listed companies are already obliged to disclose their pay packets in annual reports to shareholders. But Adam Powell, a spokesman for the Confederation of British Industry, warns that “forcing all staff to disclose their salaries, while attractive at first glance, holds all sorts of pitfalls. It is important that employers are able to pay salaries appropriate to an individual’s abilities and performance, not simply the job grade they hold. And equally employees would be reluctant for their wages to be disclosed to everyone else’s scrutiny.”

David Frost, director-general of the British Chamber of Commerce, says that some of the businesses he represents are very open about what each employee earns but that transparency is not for everyone. “Full disclosure can cause some disquiet – ‘Why is she paid more than he is?’ – and, I think, cause unnecessary problems.” Brett of the TUC says that arguments that employees would become envious of each other if salaries were disclosed do not wash as companies are already “rife with rumours” about salaries.

The former multinational head says that rigid wage structures in which everyone on the same level earns the same are unworkable. Companies would find other ways of rewarding success, and he points out that remuneration is not always based on the job people do but whether they had to be paid more to lure them from another organisation or received pay rises to be kept at the company. “Everybody is different. In my career I frequently had people working for me who earned more than me. That’s the way it is.” Knowing what others earn is not very helpful, says the former banker. “I was not so worried about what other people earned. The fact that somebody had more money than me pissed me off but I don’t think it would necessarily help to have had more transparency. To be frank, I’m just like everybody else. I just would have liked to have had more money.”

— Win My Wage starts today on Channel 4 at 4.15pm

Average salaries

Chief executive: £2.4 million

Finance director: £1.1 million

Partner at large law firm: £1 million

Prime Minister: £187,611

GP: £100,170

Senior government official: £62,623

Police officer (ranking inspectors and above): £53,036

Tube driver: £35,000

Senior university lecturer: £35,000

Civil engineer: £34,504

Trainee lawyer: £30,000

Teacher: £28,381

Senior nurse: £31,100

Pub manager: £20,890

Hairdresser: £9,486

Market research interviewer: £8,000

Sources: Office for National Statistics; Times database

Sarah Brampton: 38, head of department at a large comprehensive school in East Sussex, £39,000

John Grogan: 46, manager of a medium-sized paper company in Cheshire, £32,000

David Willis: 53, director at a utilities firm in the Midlands, £90,000 plus bonus

Mollie Simms: 32, graphic designer in creative services department for a bank in Brighton, £27,000

Jim Welch: 49, seasonal fruit farmer in East Anglia, £13,000

Robert Haver: 40, fast-food chain manager in Stratford-upon-Avon, £24,000

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