Miss Manners: It’s OK to talk money in business world

DEAR MISS MANNERS: When interviewing for a job, is it considered bad manners to ask how much the job pays? Ironically, it is not bad manners for the employer to ask how much you have earned in your previous jobs. Do you see a problem with this practice? Isn’t the real question how much are both parties willing to agree upon in the business relationship?

GENTLE READER: Your tone suggests a certain impatience with Miss Manners, who is forced to point out, in her own defense, that her only action thus far has been to open a letter addressed to her. Who says that it is bad manners to ask how much a job pays? Certainly not Miss Manners. Bans about discussing money in personal situations do not apply in the business world.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: A friend’s husband suddenly passed away, and he did not have life insurance. His widow has planned a party asking for donations to cover her expenses in paying for her husband’s funeral.

My husband and I went to the wake and funeral to pay our respects; however, we are both uneasy about making a donation to pay her expenses. Is this the new normal for funerals?

GENTLE READER: Actually, this is the old normal. Parties thrown by working-class families for the purpose of raising burial funds date back at least to the mid-19th century, when impoverished families found themselves unable to afford to meet the increasingly expensive Victorian standards of “a decent burial.”

Let us hope that the American love of fundraising will not cause the well-off to ape those original poor souls, who resorted to such methods out of a mortifying and immediate need. Now, as then, only a friend of the deceased is in a position to gauge the need of the widow against his own ability to give.