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Comment by cosbynator | Hacker News Reader

In Ontario we have some crazy law that forces all public sector salaries over $100,000 to be disclosed. For example, here is Waterloo's: http://uwaterloo.ca/documents/sal2008.php (incidentally with a pretty respected mathematics department).

A little shocking at first, but most of the people are deserving.

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FWIW, Kansas has an even more 'crazy' law. You can see the salary of every public employee:

http://www.kansas.gov/KanView/

Go to "Pay Rates By Job Title". It used to be only those above $100k, but was recently expanded to include everyone. I personally think it goes too far in including names. I could understand breaking it down by position, but giving names seems like a violation of privacy.

This is probably a regulation forced by the unions to ensure pay equality (i.e. people on the same level are paid the same).

I don't think this has anything to do with unions. Georgia has a similar website (and Georgia is mostly anti-union). I think it has more to do with being a check-and-balance when dealing with people who are being paid with public money. You often hear about those scandals where public employees gave themselves and their friends huge salaries and bonuses; I think these websites are there to expose those types of fraud. It's no different than top executives at public (public as in stock listed, rather than gov't owned) having to disclose their compensation packages. People in a position of power have a tendency to abuse that power. There needs to be transparency in these cases.

> It's no different than top executives at public (public as in stock listed, rather than gov't owned) having to disclose their compensation packages.

Except it is different in that _all_ employees are listed by name with their salary. A lowly Programmer Analyst II has no ability to determine anyone's salary, much less his own, yet is listed by full name.

Granted, I have worked in government and seen first hand that when leadership changes, suddenly there are a ton of new hires (all the friends of the new leader), so this kind of tool could be useful to make sure these new hires aren't paid over-generously. It seems like that duty could be handled by an internal auditing agency, which would have access to individual names, whereas the public would just see the range/mean/stddev for each position title.

I don't think that's a crazy law, I think that's an awesome law! Ironically, it probably helps to drive up the salaries of professors quite a lot.

Yes, if this was universally true, it would help employees negotiate. Employers sometimes claim that the goal is to reduce jealousy, but the public employees in states with this sort of law do just fine.

These are all in Canadian Dollars, correct?

I'd imagine that this policy might put some strain on the HR department because professors would compare salaries.

It is all Canadian dollars, but they exchange rate is close to par and a six figure salary here is still still relatively large. It is interesting for students because we can see how much a particular professor is 'worth' to the university. I'm not sure if it has any effect on recruiting as the disclosure isn't all that well known.

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