18 Comments Add your own

• 1. TheDetroitChannel  |  June 26th, 2007 at 4:58 am

  i don’t know if it’s good journalism, but it might be a great wake-up call to EVERYONE.

  better get use to “living your private life in public”.

  ALL this sort of info is now available online. your mortgage, for example, the deed work to your house too. your local registrar always had this info available ‘behind the counter’ somewhere. now, it’s available online.

  you can bet the bad guys know this too.

  and you thought the nigerian scam was bad?

• 2. Scott  |  June 26th, 2007 at 5:05 am

  Public information is meant to be public. Just because no one’s made an effort to publicize it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be known. And if you work for a government agency and thought your salary was somehow private, you haven’t been paying attention.

  Why is it all right for John Doe to read about Warren Buffet’s annual income (which makes not a bit of difference to him in real life) but not for him to know what his state’s police officers are paid (which might actually matter to him)?

• 3. Anonymous  |  June 26th, 2007 at 5:14 am

  Scott, it’s true that I can know your middle and last name, date of birth, addresses, phone numbers, children’s names, spouse’s name, and plenty more for free; and virtually everything else I’d like to know for a modest fee. But there’s no value in me publishing all that in a newspaper.

• 4. tdc  |  June 26th, 2007 at 5:25 am

  who says it has “no value”.

  that’s the problem with today’s “good” journalism… someone else gets to decide the value.

  probably why sales are down and people are taking to the net in SEARCH of what they think holds value.

  any more “value” in the wall2wall coverage of paris’ jail release?

  personally, i think there’s HUGE value in access to this sort of data. for one, the state police are very underpaid.

• 5. Jason  |  June 26th, 2007 at 5:51 am

  When I was a kid growing up near Chicago, my hometown suburban newspaper published the salary of every Park District employee. That included the paltry $3.35/hr earnings I made working at the local swimming pool. I figured it was required by law… like a public notice of a meeting.

  I don’t see why people are steamed by it. In the midst of a budget crisis, I presume legislative leaders are saying that the major expense of government is personnel, it’s reasonable to show how much people are making. The total often doesn’t have relevance. The individual numbers make sense to people.

  Are people steamed because they’re embarrassed to be making so much for doing so little? I presume most state employees are in a union, it’s likely not an issue of — I make more/less than my coworkers.

• 6. Rico Suave  |  June 26th, 2007 at 5:58 am

  Even though the salaries are public information, the same effect could have been accomplished by not publishing names… The people of Michigan could still learn how much police chiefs make compared with the officers, but putting a name with a number really serves no useful purpose.

  I’m a teacher in Minnesota, and anybody can go to any school district’s website and look up the salary schedule… They can see that a person with “X” years of experience and “Y” level of education makes “Z” amount of money. When a teacher is hired, it goes into the (public) school board minutes that they were hired at “Step 4, Lane 3″ on the salary schedule. There’s your public information right there.

• 7. Bob  |  June 26th, 2007 at 6:28 am

  “Who” is one of the 5-Ws.

• 8. MD  |  June 26th, 2007 at 6:59 am

  Scott, well said!
  tdc, excellent point.

  I personally think the reason some of these people get upset is that salary tends to be a measure of one’s value. While it is not an accurate one, our culture often forms opinions of others based on what they make. It’s not very fair, but it’s a quick means of summarizing one’s place in a capitalistic society.

  As with any state, the employees who had their jobs and corresponding salaries printed work for the taxpayers! In this era of wasteful government spending and mismanagement (which has led to a crisis in too many states) citizens need to see exactly how their money is spent.

• 9. Rob  |  June 26th, 2007 at 8:25 am

  What’s the big deal? Check out the URL link in my name … some PRIVATE CITIZEN has been posting the salaries of every employee in Washington State, every other year since 1995.

  If it’s information in the public domain then the public has the right to know especially since in Michigan’s case it adds context to the discussion over budget issues. If state employees are upset about the full disclosure well tough. They’re public servants, open to scrutiny because of their positions and the newspaper was well within its right to let people know that the state is having a budget crisis but look at what everyone is getting paid.

  It adds context to the story that people might not have known so it’s very relevant to the issue.

• 10. David Johnson  |  June 26th, 2007 at 8:28 am

  this isn’t just good journalism, it is great journalism. and the best part of it is that it is real ‘online’ journalism, the kind of thing that we couldn’t do well in the ink-and-paper-and-broadcast-only day and isn’t another case of shoveling platform-agnostic content to a web site, packaging up all the different multimedia elements and calling it ‘online journalism.’

  outrage comes with good journalism. it doesn’t have to be ‘gotcha’ style either. if you are exposing something to the public that has been obfuscated for whatever reason, then someone, somewhere is bound to be outraged. and why they are outraged makes for good follow up.

  three cheers for the LSJ. stay on it.

• 11. Alyssa  |  June 26th, 2007 at 9:33 am

  I think one of the Boston papers, the herald maybe, has a list of state employee salaries online. It’s a large, horrible Excel-like file, but it’s there.

• 12. Nick Geidner  |  June 26th, 2007 at 10:42 am

  I think the Indy Star did this on their website a while ago for Indiana state employees. I remember finding some of my professors salaries.

• 13. Kyle  |  June 26th, 2007 at 1:56 pm

  Taxpayers have every right to know how their money is being spent and Salaries and benefits are the number one item in most budgets.

• 14. Charles  |  June 26th, 2007 at 4:23 pm

  I live in Michigan. We have the worst economy in the country, behind Louisiana. (And they have Katrina to blame for that!) We keep losing thousands upon thousands of jobs. I’m in college, and so many people are just expecting to HAVE to move out of state when they graduate, because it is SO difficult to get a full-time job in the state, period. (Unless you’re going into health care.)

  In my opinion anything that helps to underscore the state’s budget problems can only help.

• 15. Dan  |  June 27th, 2007 at 6:12 am

  So most folks here seem to think that now the employee database is online, the public can now decide the state budget. That doesn’t really make sense to you, does it? It’s not “the budget.” It’s around 6% of the budget for all “State” employee salaries and benefits. Prior Gov’s privitized everything they could get someone else to do in Michigan.
  A responsible journalist might have published the individual salaries, along with comparisons to similar jobs in the private sector, and provide the budget dollars spent on state contracts, and (gasp!) maybe even show a comparison on how much money has been saved (or lost) due to those privitized jobs.
  Listing the names of individual that struggle behind the scenes to “do more, with less” — as our gov and legislature has asked us to do every year since Engler was first elected — was like having someone walk into your house, and just look around. Not take anything physical, not break anything, just look around.
  Think about it in that context, and you might start to feel the way I do. Then realize that the person’s work city was listed, not just county. You can call information and with a (nearby) city and name, get an address. Many state employees, due to the nature of their jobs and the people they deal with, have had to change their job locations. (Not me, by corrections officers, child support enforcement, child protective services, anyone in social work can easily end up in scary enough situations to warrant job changes.)
  I know that all this won’t change your minds, if you think that any civil servant of any level is your personal servant, but I hope that it will at least help you to understand that it’s the blatant disregard of the feelings and in some cases, safety — just because it’s your right to do it.
  My civics teacher in high school, back when they used to teach civics, told us that “your rights, stop at my nose.” If someone is harmed due to this database, will you then admit that it violated their rights? Or will you say that the LSJ doesn’t violate rights, people with guns violate rights.

• 16. Amanda  |  June 27th, 2007 at 5:28 pm

  I can understand why some state employees would have a cow if identifying information regarding them is posted online…heck I am one. For the record of those who regard civil servants as personal servants, last year I made $39,000 as an IT analyst for the State of Washington.

  There are people at my workplace who refuse to have their picture posted in the staff directory because they have ex’s who have threatened them or customers who, shall we say, are rather scary. Due to my rather unusual last name, I won’t get involved with the corrections distance learning program downstairs even though they are always looking for warm bodies around the building for on-camera work who don’t freeze up when a large studio camera is stuffed into their face. Some of their customers were put into jail by my father and some of those people have threatened me…and some have the means to, I’ve gotten plenty of calls over the years from the local PD to watch my back since so-and-so’s golden boy was thrown into jail…so I can see where some of these people’s complaints are coming from.

  I missed the fun since at the time I was working elsewhere, but a couple years back, one of the local alternative papers here in Spokane published the names and salaries of all my co-workers. Evidently after the list was published, people were calling up and giving grief to various people due to how much they were making to the point they couldn’t get the work done they were hired to do.

• 17. Anonymous  |  June 27th, 2007 at 8:59 pm

  A lot of people here seem ignorant of what is being objected to. You’re all hailing the publishing of dollar figures, but that’s not what’s objected to. It’s the publishing of names of private citizens who are being punished for working for the wrong employer, the state. Of course people should be able to know how much the state pays its workers. But why not just run photos of all state employees with big bloody red stamps of “$48,376″ across their foreheads if you’re going to go about it this way?

• 18. Anony Mouse  |  June 27th, 2007 at 10:39 pm

  I want the names of all welfare recipients published along with their county of residence and how much they get. They get paid on the taxpayer’s dime - its only fair if they can publish the names of private citizens for making the mistake of working for the wrong employer

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