Comment by SoftTalker
5 months ago
Don't ever work in the public sector then. Your salary is public record, open to anyone who is curious enough to look.
5 months ago
Don't ever work in the public sector then. Your salary is public record, open to anyone who is curious enough to look.
I think that's widely understood and part of the job description of being a public servant. What's not widely understood is HR secretly selling your data while working at a private company.
> your data
Is it yours though? The employer could probably argue that it's theirs. Devil's advocate: I think it's widely understood that entities can be transparent with their data if they choose, other than NDA scenarios.
In a market-first values system, where we rely on the labor market to largely self-regulate given the promises that free market idealogues & corporate actors made us, colluding on wages like this should lead to scorched-earth retribution from the FTC.
Not "Oh hey there, you're not allowed to do that, stop that", but "We are diluting your stock by a quarter and distributing it to your workers" type shit.
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Does my personal health information belong to my doctor? Not according to HIPAA, at least not in a way that gives the doctor control over selling it. While my pay is currently not protected by similar regulation, it seems like the kind of protection regulation similar to HIPAA could defensibly target.
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Most companies request people not share pay information. Information asymmetry is a huge deal in negotiations.
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Well, if we're discussing whose data it is the information about how much I pay you, even from a devi's advocate perspective, you can't do better than arguing that this data pertains to both of us. So we should share the property of that data somehow. I don't see how you could argue that that data would be solely the employer's data.
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... should companies be nervous about this also though? Is the decision for their payroll info to be visible to unknown buyers an intentional, well-considered one? Is this effectively leaking potentially strategically important info?
Like, I haven't seen this happen, but could a recruiting team buy the compensation data on staff at a competing firm, identify those that look like a good deal, and poach them starting with a "we'll offer you k% more than your current employer"?
Could market analysts use this data to notice when a company starts firing more people, or starts giving fewer/smaller raises? What if the next time your company showed up in a Gartner or Forrester report, it came along with a caveat "however given decreased investment in staff, their pace of product development or quality of client services may be at risk."
The employer requires this data to do payroll correctly. Apart from that, it sound only be used for expressly authorized purposes. But maybe that's a european GDPR-influenced way of seeing this issue.
Yeah I used to work for the navy. Pay was standardized under the GS pay schedule and anybody could have looked that up. I was fine with that.
In the private sector, your comp is determined by a negotiation undermined by an asymmetric information disparity. HR at a hiring company has way more information around market comp as it is without having your exact current comp when they make an offer.
What I find particularly egregious about this is that management at this company had admonished me that my comp was 'confidential' and that I shouldn't discuss it, while simultaneously selling it to equifax.
There are countries (Sweden IIRC) where the salary record is public, probably to eliminate this information asymmetry.
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Some jobs fall under this "public sector" transparency but work much more like a private employer when it comes to salary negotiation. For example a state university recruits staff and negotiates compensation much like a private employer (no equity options of course) but your salary will be public if you are hired.
Why would that be a widely understood part of the job description? Almost every American teacher, firefighter, planner, street engineer, health inspector, police officer, train conductor, bus driver, along with the managers, office administrative staff, janitors, and groundskeepers that support those activities are public sector employees. What do they have in common that would suggest they deserve less privacy than you do?
Most of these jobs are not special or meaningfully "public". They're just normal jobs for firms that happen to be public bodies. I don't think it's at all obvious that people are knowingly and deliberately making these tradeoffs by working there.
>What do they have in common that would suggest they deserve less privacy than you do?
That they receive their salary from the tax payer, the public is their employer, and it'd be pretty odd if your employer didn't know what they paid you. They're executive organs of the state, police and firefighters, unlike private workers, also don't get to choose what laws they enforce or what fires they put out. If you're a civil servant you obviously forego most of the rights of private sector workers in exchange for usually lifetime employment and set pay rates.
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Usually they all get paid more or less the same since compensation is directly tied to the job title/rank and other public criteria. This information (in aggregate) shouldn't ever be non-public (under any circumstances) due to obvious reason. So even if your specific salary/wage is not published anyone who knows what's your specific title/job would be able to estimate it somewhat accurately.
Public servants do not make enough money to be useful targets. The meaningful threat comes from large compensation tied to other asset information (tying an online person to that income, not difficult). You can buy lists of these already tied up and ready to download for your scheming pleasure. From English Rolex robbers to Florida kidnappers, they all enjoy the data.
I do not think it can be stopped, but the days when a wealthy person could safely live in a suburb and have the kids imagine that they are middle class is long gone. It is terrifying. The best thing for a wealthy discrete person to do is move to Singapore or Australia, or somewhere with a sufficiently low crime rate to feel comfortable, or get quality security, which sucks.
The security minded can move to a gated community, which are all over the place and have existed for a very long time, and don't require moving to Singapore or Australia to live in one.
I can't see a gated community being much of a deterrent to a gang of kidnappers sophisticated enough to use these services to find potential victims. Maybe if the gate has armed guards and a strict "no tailgating" policy with ID checks etc.
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The information available via the public record is not as detailed (typically annual salary)and not definitively tied to any person. The Work Number is tied to your SSN and is much more detailed than the public record (each paycheck and a breakdown of different compensation).
In the US, most municipalities will publish each employee's compensation every year. You can literally look them up by name.
I think this is a little off, in that the data isn't coming from the various government entities or at least isn't required to be provided. I know at least in California most of the info is gathered by third parties using FOIA requests. It's also not associated with a SSN and just typically gives the annual compensation with limited categories. The Work Number on the other hand gets paycheck level details. Considering the data would be useless without a unique identifier, SSN is sent with it. Using The Work Number data, you could see pay period granularity changes to their compensation.
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That is exactly what they are saying. The public records typically contain annual compensation, not the detailed breakdown available via Work Number.
Which is fine. The problem is the imbalance of information and therefore bargaining power between workers and employers. With this information salary negotiation is like playing poker with your cards open so only thing it does is depress wages.
That's not a problem for the public sector because both sides can see it and there is no real negotiation (you still save time/money by not having to go thought the interview process to figure out your potential compensation).
or live in Sweden (where your earnings as well as your address and property, car or pet ownership are public record)
I’ve read about that. Is ipen to ANYbody? Is there a link?
Thanks
Multiple websites resell the financial data for like $4 per check, for example https://www.ratsit.se/ (you can try with 'sven svennson') One can also just call the tax agency and ask. The person looking up the information does not need to provide their data.
Living addresses, birth date, vehicles, pets are available in plain text without login and can be Googled.
IIRC in Norway at least everyone (who lives there) can check it but your name will be recorded and visible to that person.
The problem is not public salary. In EU multiple countries have it public with noe issues to anyone. I'm outside of EU and also have my data public due to owning an LLC.
The problem is identity fraud, and evil corpos like equifax plus some weird laws facilitate it way too much on a giant scale. This is what's infuriating.