Pay snooping
I hadn’t realized until I read this piece in Cosmic Variance that you can scope out the pay of every employee of the University of California who earns more than $100,000 by searching an online database. I imagine that my ignorance is not shared by senior academics within the system, who are able to see what their colleagues are paid at the click of a button. I’m curious as to what effects (if any), this has on intra-department relations. Departments usually keep relative pay levels secret, for fear of arousing envy and resentment among scholars who consider themselves to be underpaid relative to their colleagues (merit pay increases and efforts to match outside offers may lead to significant divergences). So what happens when the books are opened (at least among a select subset of academics). I could imagine that this might cause internal bickering. I could also imagine that it might give rise to a social norm that no-one discusses their colleagues’ pay (even when they know damn well what it is) with reference to their own so as to avoid unpleasantness and fractiousness within the department.
Comments
This is also true for universities in Ontario.
Posted by: Simon | September 26, 2009 10:08 PM
Which, if it was true in 2002-2004 too, may suggest that the second equilibrium (reinforced perhaps by ignorance) prevails rather than the first - or at least, I never heard a word about this when I was employed at the U of T …
Posted by: Henry | September 26, 2009 10:41 PM
I searched Brad DeLong, and he actually makes less than a clinical nurse V named DeLong. Huh.
Posted by: david | September 26, 2009 11:17 PM
Actually all salaries for the UC are available through a data base, not just those making $100k plus.
http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/
This has raised questions about who is over and underpaid on various blogs before, but I am not aware of it leading to any problems in departments—well not in mine anyway. If it did, I suspect it would be among the senior faculty—juniors would be nuts to raise such issues.
Posted by: Anon | September 27, 2009 04:17 AM
It started in the late 90s. I think anyone who’s around for long knows about it, but in my experience it certainly isn’t talked about.
Posted by: SImon | September 27, 2009 08:23 AM
This is true for lots of public employees:
http://bit.ly/ojkjb
My experience has been that so long as pay roughly corresponds to merit, there aren’t issues.
Posted by: C. Zorn | September 27, 2009 10:22 AM
Blame my lack of a Stanford offer in the past decade—and the Social Science Dean’s calling my bluff when various people on the east coast came sniffing…
Posted by: Brad DeLong | September 27, 2009 01:30 PM
At Wayne State University, everyone’s salary is public record via the AAUP. The union actually sends the spreadsheet to each professor. Not always very pleasant as you might imagine.
Posted by: Patti Abbott | September 27, 2009 02:17 PM
At Wayne State University, everyone’s salary is public record via the AAUP. The union actually sends the spreadsheet to each professor. Not always very pleasant as you might imagine.
Posted by: Patti Abbott | September 27, 2009 02:17 PM