Dear Premier Notley,
I am deeply disturbed by Bill 5: The Public Sector Compensation Transparency Act. Under this new act, individuals receiving compensation greater than a defined “threshold” level will be identified on an annual ‘sunshine list’ with their names listed next to their salary and benefits.
The publication of such lists are often held as a means of providing more transparency and accountability. Justice Minister Ganley’s statements to the press last week confirm this to be the case with Bill 5. In some cases, this sort of reporting makes good sense. The compensation of members of the province’s agencies, boards, and commissions is largely unknown and undisclosed to the public. Absurdly high salary, benefit, and severance packages of senior bureaucrats, school superintendents, and university presidents have been widely reported over the last few years. Yet evidence may not back up the assumption that releasing their compensation leads to greater transparency and more careful management of the public purse strings.
The effectiveness of sunshine lists to reduce the varicose compensation packages of senior public sector employees is dubious. As Gomez and Wald (1) report, “there is no evidence suggesting that salary disclosure has much of an influence in off-setting... factors affecting salary growth”. In fact, the authors suggest that publishing public salaries and benefits can have an inflationary effect whereby individuals use others’ remuneration to negotiate for more lucrative compensation for themselves. “Basically, the only thing it’s done in Ontario is drive up salaries,” offered Daniel Cohn, an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration at York University in a CBC story on that province’s sunshine list (2). In the same article, Finn Poschmann, Vice-President of Research at the C.D. Howe Institute is reported as saying, “A skilled negotiator will make very good use of [the information in a sunshine list] and will put upward pressure on salaries and total compensation packages as opposed to downward pressure”.
David Turpin, the new president at the University of Alberta, for example, certainly referred to outgoing president, Indira Samaresekera’s, $544,000 in salary and over $1.1 million dollars in total compensation (3) when considering his move to the U of A. Samaresekera’s remuneration, not the position’s base salary of $400,000, almost certainly became the starting point for Turpin in his contract negotiations. Furthermore, the availability of this information does nothing to reduce the growing inequality between the compensation of university administrators and their faculty members, nor does it provide sufficient pressure for the U of A president (in-coming or out-going) to take meaningful action on an ongoing grievance with the staff association, ironically one related to faculty merit pay (4). Public accountability needs to be about more than salaries.
Suffice it to say, I am concerned about the ineffectiveness, not to mention the privacy implications, of the province’s current sunshine list and the expansion proposed in Bill 5: The Public Sector Compensation Transparency Act. I am greatly bothered, however, by part 10 of the bill which specifies the information that education bodies shall be authorized to disclose if the bill is implemented as currently written.
In its current verbiage, education bodies shall be authorized to disclose:
(a) the names of all employees or of all employees in a particular class of employees of the education body;
(b) any position, appointment or classification held by each employee named pursuant to clause (a);
(c) the amount of remuneration and benefits provided to each employee named pursuant to clause (a);
(d) the amount of severance, if any, provided to each employee named pursuant to clause (a);
(e) the documents, records and other information in respect of employee remuneration, benefits and severance determined by the education body.
Whereas “threshold” amounts have been listed for employees of the Government of Alberta ($104,754) and public sector bodies ($125,000), no threshold amount has been listed for an “education body” (which is defined in the bill to include all public, separate, Francophone, charter, and publicly-funded private schools). While Bill 5 grants each education body to release this information “in the form and manner and to the extent” of its choosing, I have very little faith that most of the province’s school districts will proceed with anything less than a full release of teacher and employee compensation information. As collective agreements come up for renegotiation, some school districts will no doubt see the publication of teacher compensation lists as a political wedge that can be used to divide the public. With the province’s workforce so off-balanced during the current economic downturn, the narrative of “Look how much your son or daughter’s teacher makes!” is a powder keg.
Crown prosecutors argued for, and won a Court of Queen’s Bench ruling that saw them removed from sunshine lists because it could put them at risk (5). While teachers, in general, do not need to worry about being physically harmed or extorted by their students, there is a social risk for individual teachers’ names being associated with particular salaries. Ask any school administrator and you’ll hear that at the beginning of the school year they field countless requests from parents who want their child to be in the ‘best’ teacher’s class. Imagine the result of giving parents access to teacher pay information. How might teachers’ names next to their salaries become a false indicator of efficacy? A list of teacher compensation provides no information about an individual’s training, experience, or classroom context. While a sunshine list is not meant to rate and rank teachers or schools, in our neoliberal age, we know how this is going to go.
The creation of a sunshine list that includes public school board employees is, by and large, unnecessary, since the compensation of all but the senior administration is governed by collective agreements.
For central office staff who are not bound by collective agreements, there is no reason to believe that the release of their salary and benefits will result in anything except voyeurism by colleagues and inflation of their compensation over time, as seen in Ontario. The sunshine list’s intended purpose, to make an education body more accountable for their use of public funds and more careful with how it compensates senior staff, will likely have the unintended result of inflating superintendent salaries, benefits, and severance.
Collective agreements for most public school teachers and staff include information on all matters related to salary, benefits, and severance. Public sector bargaining units do make use of the information from other collective agreements in their negotiations with employers which leads to gradual increases in compensation over time, rather than the run-away increases seen in senior administration and appointments to the province’s agencies, boards, and commissions where individual negotiations take place. These collective agreements are easily available for most public sector employers including school boards. A sunshine list is not necessary.
I encourage you to propose a number of amendments to Bill 5.
First, the bill should define employees such as teachers, nurses, and police officers, et cetera, as “front-line workers” (or another appropriate label) and should grant these individuals the same rights to privacy as granted to Crown prosecutors. Where remuneration is not negotiated behind closed doors, these individuals should be secure that their names are not publicly available and that only the information included in collective agreements is released.
If this is not possible, employees working for education bodies whose compensation is outlined in a collective agreement (such as teachers working in public school boards) should be omitted from the list. It will be the duty of the employer to ensure that collective agreements are easily accessible to the public. Employees in education bodies whose compensation is not governed by a collective agreement (including senior administrators in public school boards, and staff in charter and publicly-funded private schools) can be included on the list, but a threshold amount, similar to the ones defined for Government of Alberta and public sector bodies must be determined. If deemed appropriate by the education body, data on the number of individuals working at different ranks on pay scales can be published but should not identify any individual by name. The benefit of releasing such information, however, is not apparent to me.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the results of making public sector compensation public must be studied. Sound public policy can only come from having good evidence. It is quite possible that sunshine lists are totally ineffective and that we’re letting the narrative of transparency erode the privacy of our fellow Albertans. While I am concerned about cronyism and misspending of public dollars, I’m more worried that sunshine lists are a non sequitur that will do little more than sow discontent. It just might be that they’re not the droids we’re looking for.
Sincerely,
Dan Grassick
Calgary, AB
1 Gomez, R., & Wald, S. (2010). When public-sector salaries become public knowledge: Academic salaries and Ontario’s Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, Canadian Public Administration, 53(1), 107-126.
2 Stastna, K. (2014, April 1). Sunshine list 2014: Ontario’s list drives salaries up, not down, CBC News. Retrieved from: http://tinyurl.com/o6pj3nl
3 Howell, T. (2015, January 13). Compensation of Alberta’s top university and college execs reignites calls for review, Calgary Herald. Retrieved from: http://tinyurl.com/k49twtj
4 Association of Academic Staff University of Alberta (2015, November 16). UofA administration refuse to pay academic staff their merit increment pay. Retrieved from: http://www.aasua.ca/home/
5 Ramsay, C. (2014, January 30). Alberta’s sunshine list will not include salary information of Crown prosecutors, Global News. Retrieved from: http://tinyurl.com/nzub35v