Intellectual Property Law

Still More Online Salary Data

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

I have complained before (here and here) about private entities that make public employee salary data available online. Now my local newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, has jumped on the bandwagon, plopping data about the paychecks of at least 52,000 state, county, and city employees into an online database, conveniently searchable by name. (Actually, the newspaper can’t get it straight, since the same page states in different places that there are “52,000″ and “more than 54,000″ records in the database.)

The accompanying articles analyze statutory salary caps that, the newspaper suggests, are causing pay compression and making hiring and retention more difficult, at least at the top of the scale. Fine, probably an important issue (although the stories don’t say much beyond that one-sentence summary). But how does this journalistic purpose justify providing a database that lets you enter the name of any mid-level public employee and find out how much he or she makes? Answer: it doesn’t. Indeed, the reporters and editors at the paper seem to agree, as their articles include almost no particular examples of average employees’ salaries. The articles were accompanied by an unusual front-page letter from the editor. Its extremely defensive tone and lack of any real argument showing why name-by-name results would help readers understand the bigger issues shows that the editors were nervous about their incursion on privacy, but not enough to do the right thing:

Full post as published by Info/Law on July 16, 2008 (boomark / email).