Around four and a half million people in Britain will get a new job in 2005 - will you be one of them? For many people January is a perfect time to start looking for a new job or career, but most workers will be in the dark about the salary they could realistically expect to earn. But help is now at hand, with a new web based initiative www.paywizard.org launched today this week by the TUC and Incomes Data Services (IDS).

Talking about pay is still a taboo in many workplaces and too many workers don’t know what they are really worth. This lack of transparency can leave people unknowingly underpaid. Big variations in pay exist within career structures, between men and women and between the UK’s different regions. For example, a graphic designer in London is paid on average £16.87 an hour whereas in the West Midlands they could expect to be paid only £8.89 an hour.

To help bridge the information gap, the TUC and Incomes Data Services, the UK’s leading pay research organisation, have got together to launch PayWizard. On the site workers can check their salary against others doing the same job. They can find out what they could earn in other careers, and uncover regional differentials.

PayWizard.co.uk is part of an international project and the first of its kind. Unions and leading academics in a growing number of countries are working together to create a series of national online pay checkers. In order to do this, they are gathering pay data through an anonymous salary survey that lets people enter their own details about their job and pay. The data collected will be used to compare pay and conditions in the UK and worldwide.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: 'This is an exciting and innovative project. For too many people pay has been surrounded in secrecy, making the perfect environment for inequality and discrimination to flourish undetected. This website shines a light on the issue. It will help employees and unions uncover some of the unfair differences in pay that we know exist, and help people find out what they are really worth.'

Alastair Hatchett, Head of Pay Services at IDS, said: 'Having access to better information means making better decisions. This is as true for individuals as it is for organisations. We think this project draws on some of the advantages of the internet in a new and useful way. It enables workers to gain access to a continuously evolving source of reliable information on how much people actually earn.'