I Refuse to Get a Lower Salary Than the Colleague I Trained

100 percent leave you kicked the hornets nest and if the company is underpaying you they do not care about you if your client based they don't wanna lose the clients not sure if it's legal but tell your client you are leaving and they would be welcome to continue the working relationship and trust you have built and the new company I'm sure your new employer would love the new business DO NOT TRUST YOUR CURRENT EMPLOYER and good luck with your new job

I'm going to say something that a lot of people are not going to like but first some background about me I ran the third largest Federal Union in the United States, I helped implement the Ada in the federal government for afge or along with afg national leaders. That being said I have a significant amount of experience with labor law. What human resources said is 100% inappropriate and illegal. However there are some caveats to the law. First and foremost you cannot be prevented from discussing your salary with your coworkers at any time with the following exception: management can declare that you may not discuss any personnel actions on company time and on company property. This would legally be considered stealing time or malingering or not doing your job and wasting time. If the statement is phrased in that regard then HR would have been 100% correct. Now a lot of you are going to say but the federal law but the federal law that is true federal law allows you to talk about your salary but it doesn't specifically state that you haven't implicit right to discuss it at any time and at work you should be focused on work. Additionally there are several people myself included that do not wish to talk about their personnel actions. I make it a policy not to discuss my salary my sick leave my vacation my bonuses if I get any my benefits or anything like that. Now I can talk in general terms but I will not get into specifics. When you're in the Federal government, your grade and step are public knowledge. So when I started I was a gs7 step one and economist when I left I was a GS 12 step 2. This is public knowledge. Now at the department of Labor bonuses were paid based on your evaluation the lowest passing evaluation which is a decent evaluation is fully successful. Our contract with the department did not require a performance bonus paid out if you got a fully successful. Additionally there were limited amounts of money to be paid for bonuses and people that got highly effective or outstanding were mandated to get minimum bonuses. Those bonuses were hard to get or actually those ratings were hard to get and few people got them. There was no requirement to pay everyone that got a fully successful a bonus. Often if there was left over money after the highly effective and outstandings were paid off people with fully successful got money and there was a minimum amount of money that you would get by contract. It wasn't enough to cover everyone in the office I worked in and typically the people that got the bonuses were in the quote in crowd quote. I got into a discussion with somebody that got a bonus and also got a fully successful I got nothing their response was well it was only $200 and I said that was $200 more than I got and I was in a pretty pissed off mood for a couple of months over it. Additionally I stopped helping that person and it caused some friction in the office. I changed my attitude because essentially what I was doing was creating a hostile work environment which goes into my second point. It is possible that there are people in the office that do not want to talk about or hear the discussion of any kind of personnel action or event and that is protected under the law as well with regards to creating a safe psychological space as they now call it in the most woke States. But federal law does allow an employee to complain that a hostile work is it is the impact of the conversation and not the intent of the conversation that matters. In other words, your discussion with a coworker about your salary might upset me just by the fact that you're having it and I have the legal right to go to HR and make a formal complaint. Thus management is permitted to limit conversations that are non-work-related in the office space. This has been upheld in almost every instance for the employer when it is gone before the authorities namely the flra which is the federal labor board and the nlrb which is for Private industry. So mm

It is federally illegal for them to tell you that you can't share salaries, let alone make a policy about it and has been for years.