I’m not going to assign blame to a particular individual for the posting of payroll information. I don’t know if that decision was made by the Director of CRI, board members or the anonymous money men behind the whole thing. But Dave Burris got all bent out of shape for Kavips’ dissection of one of their employees resumes. Dave’s main complaint seemed to be the poisoning of the well for said director in his next job interview.
One could make the case that the director of a non-profit is a “public figure” which carries special significance in law. If someone on the right attacks the Delaware director of ACORN, I doubt that Dave would mount such a defense.
What I am going to look at is the potential impact of the payroll data that CRI has posted.
In the next few years, it seems likely that Governor Markell will be cutting positions and putting a number of State workers on the job market. How does their life get impacted by CRI?
If a state employee resume comes across a potential employers desk, CRI’s database of payroll data is likely to assist the employer in negotiating salary. I won’t speak to individuals, but I know a number of people in DTI. I have taken a spin around the CRI database to see what kind of salaries they are drawing. Many of them are way below the comparable rates for private sector. That is a great starting point for a new employer, but not so good for a potential employee.
I wonder how much personal income this will end up costing state employees? Let’s take an employee aged 50 and say that they make 80K per year. I have worked with this person, and know that with their breadth of knowledge they could garner a private sector position in the 130K range. If that person is artificially devalued to 100K, you could be looking at a potential loss of 30K/year over the course of 15 years or a total of $450K by the age of 65.
I wonder if this sort of outcome was anticipated by the CRI gang. To his credit, Dave Burris has stated that he thought personally identifiable information should be excluded from the database. Apparently, Dave left sometime after his suggestion was overruled.
I don’t know who at CRI was responsible for the decision, but certainly there is a difference between the analysis of a public figure’s resume and the impact on innocent state employees that may lose 10’s or 100’s of thousands of earning potential. The overall difference is a matter of exponential proportions.