Friday, January 04, 2013

Vastly Different

For most of my working life I've worked for companies or a private university. Now I work for a governmental entity. What fascinates me is how public everything that we do has now become. There was a payroll issue today, which was a pretty big deal but I recognize that this is the first time this has happened in 30 years so that's pretty damn good. I have been at least one other (maybe 2 actually) places where this issue has happened before.  The big difference - this was front page news in my hamlet. Apparently once a year my employer will publish the salaries of pretty much all of us. I'm not sure if they do it by job title or specify salary by person. Under the Freedom of Information Act, people can request all sorts of information (and in fact I had to sign off on a form so that they couldn't release my SSN). 

The result of this is that everything we tell people (including employees) is fairly calculated. I went over to a notboss (if you will recall a notboss is what I refer to as someone higher on the food chain than me but not over my department) to ask what I needed to tell employees when they called and he couldn't believe employees would call my group on this. The man has no idea. We get called for everything - in fact I frequently hear "I don't think this is your area but..." JFC if you know I'm not the right persno why are you calling me?

1 comment:

VeeBee said...

Ahhhh, yes, life in City Hall! Our City publishes our names and salaries as well. Our citizens despise us, and our pensions. And, the veterans employees know that whenever we want the scoop on practically any subject, we call our peeps in payroll/HR!