Pay ‘outing’ raises lots of questions
How much money did you make last year?
Oh, I’m sorry. Did you find that question rude? Embarrassing?
Discussing our pay is one of the last social taboos. Modern manners allow us to ask one another the most intimate questions about our sex lives, our diets, our politics. But few of us want to reveal the precise amount of our salaries. We know people will judge us by what we earn, whether they think we make too much, or too little. In a culture that encourages us to share and overshare, most of us still want to be discreet about our take-home pay for fear people will think we’re boasting or whinging.
But late Friday afternoon thousands of Alberta civil servants lost that right to privacy. Under its new “sunshine law,” Alberta has released the precise salaries of each provincial bureaucrat who earns more than $100,000 a year — roughly 3,400 of them.
Those people are all on the public payroll. You might argue that we have a right, as citizens, to know exactly who makes what. And when it comes to the most highly paid senior managers and top political aides, the people with the most power and the most generous pay packages, I’d agree. We have a right to know if we’re getting value for money, if people have received salaries or severance packages that are inappropriate given their job performance. The aggregate data may help us see if women and men are being paid equitably or if some departments seem out of line with others.
It’s harder to see the value in “outing” thousands of others largely anonymous bureaucrats — at least, not if we’re motivated by anything beyond curiosity and envy.
For those of us who earn less than $100,000 per annum, it’s easy to resent those with six-figure salaries.
Yet in Alberta, there are plenty in the private sector who earn that much and more. Is it necessary for the betterment of public policy or good governance to embarrass individual workers who make such sums?
On Thursday the court, in response to an application from a concerned Crown prosecutor, granted an injunction which temporarily forbids the government from releasing the salaries of all prosecutors, on the grounds that such information could put criminal prosecutors at particular risk. But the exemption doesn’t include others with jobs that could be dangerous. And that’s what worries Ryan Callioux.
On Friday, Callioux, a respected civil litigator with the province’s social enhancement legal team, submitted his resignation. The sunshine law, he says, is one of the reasons he’s leaving after 10 years of public service.
Callioux regularly appears in court to compel non-custodial parents to pay child support or to obtain orders to apprehend abused or neglected children.
“These areas are fraught with sensitivity,” he says. “A person who is willing to be violent cannot necessarily be taken to be rational. Our concern is that someone who’s willing to be violent should have less information about us, rather than more.”
He believes it wasn’t necessary to publish individual names and salaries.
“The government could have provided the number of employees within certain salary ranges. That would accomplish the same goal without potentially putting government employees at risk.”
Despite the injunction, despite Callioux’s argument, I’m not quite convinced that publishing the salaries of lawyers with high-risk case loads puts them in explicit danger. Other provinces, including British Columbia and Ontario, already publish sunshine lists, and there are no indications anyone’s safety has been compromised.
The greater danger may be to our political culture. We have to ask the cost of shaming individual public servants for being good at their jobs. We have to ask whether this data will help make better decisions or simply incite our envious voyeurism. We have to ask whether Tories are presenting this data in a punitive — rather than accountable — way to intimidate the public sector in a time of budget stress.
It would be fine indeed if this information led to thoughtful public debate about the way we compensate top bureaucrats and political operatives. It will be less fine if dedicated public servants walk away rather than let us peek at their pay stubs.