As if filing taxes wasn't a good enough reason to hang on to your old pay stubs, thousands of Mexican guest farm workers are discovering another reason: back pay.

As the New York Times reported Monday, the governments of the United States and Mexico are working to give the 2.5 million braceros a one-time payment of $3,500 for long overdue withheld wages. One problem is that many of the former migrant workers who came to the United States to work in the program from 1942 to 1964 are either dead or in their old age, and are having difficulty tracking down the documents they need to prove they were in the U.S. about 50 or so years ago.

The Mexican government took 10% of the braceros' wages to hold until their eventual return to Mexico. But many didn't get it back, and in 2001 a group of braceros from the World War II era filed a federal lawsuit against Mexico. The government announced a reparation program in 2005, but required braceros in the United States to travel to Mexico to register, a difficult journey for the elderly and infirm, the Times reported.

Employers everywhere are tightening their belts in response to the current financial crisis. A good deal of employers are already past cutting travel and other expenses and are looking at payroll to keep costs in check. This complicates matters for any employee who is up for a raise right now, myself included. Thankfully CNN has a list of six benefits to barter for if a pay hike is out of the question.

The benefits compiled in partnership with Careerbuilder.com include the following:

• Time off
• Relaxed dress code
• Education opportunities
• Going green bonuses
• Flexible schedules
• Wellness benefits

I found this list to be quite useful since the timing on my negotiation for a raise is what can be referred to as unfortunate to say the least, and I may have to settle for perks rather than cash. While I am a big fan of using perks such as the ability to work from home, flexible schedules and a relaxed dress code to retain employees during good economic times they are a poor substitute for cash when expenses are rising. Have you tried paying your mortgage in casual Fridays? The banks aren't that desperate....yet.

Sadly with the bailout having little positive effect on the stock market it looks like employees looking for compensation will have to make do with perks rather than payment for the time being. Then again if you work for AIG, a recipient of government funding, the perks may be worth it!

I just finished reading an article on CNN about individuals who send out invites to their friends for a party without asking them to pay for any of it and then expecting the friends to go dutch when the bill comes. For a second I felt like I was reading a bad chain letter forwarded to me by a distant cousin; I almost went to Snopes to check and see if this was really happening to people. Are there still people who are either this aloof or this self centered out there that they would send out an invitation to dinner and not indicate on the invite that the attendees should expect to split the entire bill?

Don't get me wrong, if I am invited to a dinner party out on the town I have no problem footing my bill. I'll avoid high priced alcohol and stick to something from the middle range of the menu. When a host informs everyone at the end of the night that they should just split the bill 8 ways and I have to subsidize everyone else's filet mignon and alcohol induced stupor then that is a different beast entirely. Maybe it's just living in a relatively small Midwest town that I don't run into this, or possibly I just don't have the tolerance to put up with anyone who would pull this kind of stunt long enough to get a dinner invite!

A recent New York Times piece looks at the hot button topic of whether employees should know how much their coworkers make. The current discussion was spawned by a post on The Brazen Careerist but the issue of salary transparency isn't a new one. A professor at University of Southern California has been studying the subject for over 4 decades and notes that the current behavior of not disclosing pay is related to our upbringing and the fear of finding out our perceived value is lower due to a coworker's higher pay.

The professor went on to note that we are often off on how much we think our coworkers make, giving our boss a smaller salary and inflating those of people in similar positions, which he notes is a simply asking for trouble. Whether you think salaries should be transparent or not I found it interesting to discover that we underestimate how much our bosses make, which makes me reevaluate the paychecks at my day job! If anything I would think we would overestimate those above us especially anyone higher than your direct supervisor and undervalue those who work at slightly lower levels in the organization.

In order to achieve a transparent salary setting at an office the way in which salaries are awarded and increased needs to be quantified and made known to all of the people working there. In my situation this would be a deal breaker; it isn't so much that I would be upset if I found out a coworker is making several thousand more than me but to find out without a reason behind the disparity would be problematic. My current day job doesn't make the salaries known to employees and for the most part it seems that we as employees are OK with this but unfortunately my employer doesn't lay out the pay ranges and scales associated with determining salary which makes it easy for employees to feel as if they are underpaid for the experience, education and performance. I don't care how much my coworkers are making but I'd love to see where I sit in the pay scale for my position and description.