Comment by hypeatei
5 months ago
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.
5 months ago
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.
> given the promises that free market idealogues & corporate actors made us
I find it amusing/annoying how many Free™-market boosterism messages are actually contradictory "heads I win, tails you lose" constructs. For example:
1. "Regulations are bad, because left to its own devices the market will be optimally-efficient, once everyone has perfect-information about all the prices and deals other people are making."
2. "Regulations are bad, because cartels and collusion will be destroyed by defectors who use their freedom to make secret prices and hidden deals."
Sometimes these arguments come from the same people, but even when they don't they represent two wildly incompatible ideas of what "the free market" really is.
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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.
Your personal health information is information that pertains to you and you only. Your compensation is part of a contract between yourself and your employer, hence why both parties have to sign it, and why both parties have ownership over it.
Not arguing that payroll information can't be protected, my only point was that your comparison was off.
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Most companies request people not share pay information. Information asymmetry is a huge deal in negotiations.
Such a “requirement” is illegal. https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...
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But in the US, federal labor law makes it illegal for employers to prevent employees from sharing pay information (at least for employees who are entitled to unionize).
They can request it, but can't stop you if you do.
You can also request them to do likewise, with similar recourse.
A request is nothing without teeth behind it.
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I never have but I have never been told I couldn't share pay information. Certainly I have with my accountant and financial advisor. I've also been asked when applying for a new job whether or not I've been 100% forthcoming.
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.
If it has my name on it, it likely belongs to me. The portion that clearly belongs to the company, are the role, the amount, and my initials (maybe an anonymying number would be better?)
They're welcome to do what they want with that, but once it includes the ability to make inferences about me as an individual, more than the company, it becomes my data. I likely have to choose to share it to meet the terms of the emploment contract, but that doesn't change the appropriate ownership.
Try and apply whatever rules you want to IP the company claims to own? Surely the exact details of some trade secret process also belongs to me and I can do whatever I want with it because I need to know it to fulfill the terms of that same contract right? I can sell it to a 3rd party just 'cause right?
If I administer a survey, collect responses, and put them into a spreadsheet, is the data in that spreadsheet not mine despite the fact that it consists of things that other people told me? I can't share it without the permission of those surveyed, assuming I didn't promise not to?
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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.
Finland has National Jealousy Day:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/finland-has-just-publ...
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.
I don't think it's odd that we get to know what bus drivers get paid, but I don't think there's any special grand bargain to these jobs that make the privacy implications less significant. If we get to know what the janitor at my village hall makes, I have a lot less of a problem with Equifax knowing how much more Python developers make.
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.