Posts Tagged ‘salaries’

There are certain stories that you can guarantee will get covered each year. Each February in Canada, RSP season brings stories about the lack of preparedness for retirement we Canadians are demonstrating. Each Canada Day, the Dominion Institute releases a poll that shows we Canadians don’t know our own history very well.

Every time Apple releases a new product you’ll see stories about the lineups and pictures of Steve Jobs in his turtleneck and jeans.

And at the end of March, Ontario media cover the Sunshine List. Not to be confused with the Sunshine GIRL (an exercise in a different sort of transparency), the Sunshine list was the result of a law passed in the mid-1990s by the provincial government . Pretty simple as laws go: anyone on the public payroll in the province — provincial public servants, employees of universities, colleges, towns, cities, hospitals — who makes over $100,000 gets put on the list and the employers are responsible for making the  list public by the end of March.

Back then, the Mike Harris government was in power in Ontario, and they loved the idea of populism, being in solidarity with the “little guy”, Joe Sixpack. So this sort of vague public shaming — providing a list of people who you could tsk tsk or wag a finger at — worked for them, quite nicely.

So every year, talk-radio hosts fulminate, columnists critique (Christina Blizzard: “There are 63,761 people on the provincial list this year. That’s up 10,000 over last year…April Fool’s? I guess the joke’s on us.”) and journalists write about how the ranks of the $100K earners area swelling. This Brantford Expositor editorial notes:

Five years ago, The Expositor published a local “Sunshine List” with 78 names. The list published in Saturday’s Expositor has grown to 349 names.

Here’s what I say. The Sunshine list has some serious flaws. First, $100K in 1995 is not the same as $100K today. In fact, just on inflation, it’s more like $133K. Assuming pay raises followed Canada’s inflation rate, someone making $77K in 1995 would be above $100K today just from cost-of-living. And freaking out because the list grows every year makes as much sense as freaking out because prices go up every year; that is to say, none.

Second, it doesn’t expose “fat cats” – there are all sorts of people who are normal working people who end up on this list. Police officers, firemen, bus drivers, nurses — they’re all there, mostly because they’ve worked enough overtime to hit the magic number.

Third, it doesn’t measure VALUE. The top public servant on the list is the head of Ontario Power Generation, who makes $2.5 million, apparently. What does that number tell us? Damned if I know. It’s a lot of money. Is it well spent? Does he make more than others in similar jobs? Does he outperform his compatriots?

Fourth, it reinforces our sometimes-perverse attitudes toward public-sector compensation. We pay our Prime Minister about $300,000 to run a G8 country. We pay the president of the Bruyere Continuing Care Centre $30,000 more than the PM to run an organization with 753 beds and 1,000 employees. The minimum salary for an NHL player is $450K. Formula 1 Driver Kimi Raikonnen made $45,000,000 last year (US!). Nortel‘s CEO made more than seven times as much as the PM last year.

So until we compensate people more in line with the VALUE they add to society, I humbly suggest that we kill the Sunshine list. As an exercise in effective communication about  compensation and the contribution to society, it is an utter failure.

Photo credit: Dru! on Flickr, creative-commons licensed.