Commentary: Just post employees' compensation in the break room

Luckily, I have my staff and the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce Legislative Watch Council to help keep me up on issues I would probably miss with the many other things going on in our business community.

Here is one I thought particularly absurd. Senate Bill 122, officially called "Prohibition of Action against an Employee for Sharing Wage information," sponsored by Sen. Sue Windels, D-Arvada, and Rep. Terrance Carroll, D-Denver.

Here is the bill summary in politico-speak:

"Makes it a discriminatory or unfair labor practice for an employer to discharge, discipline, discriminate against, coerce, intimidate, threaten, or interfere with an employee because the employee inquired about, disclosed, compared, or otherwise discussed wages; to require as a condition of employment nondisclosure by an employee of his or her wages; or to require an employee to sign a waiver denying the employee the right to discuss wages."

Let me put this in terms that will be better understood (at least according to my interpretation) by those of you that don't take legislative proposals on your ski trips to read on the chair lifts.

Let's say your business manager or chief financial officer, whom you have to trust with confidential information, decided to share your managers' compensation with the rest of the staff.

Under SB-122, it would be no big deal. You would have no recourse except to let this person continue to share manager and employee compensation plans with pretty much whomever this person wants.

Employee morale? Apparently no concern to Carroll or Windels. Employee work production? Again, who cares? Let's just buy another water cooler or expand the break-room so the staff will have plenty of room to compare manager and staff compensation?

Rewarding an outstanding employee a bonus or added compensation because he or she made the company some extra money or came up with an idea to save your company money -- nope this could lead to standardized pay scales or you may be penalized. Rewarding some employees and not others -- not good.

How about others that you have trusted with confidential information? Your IT department that has access to your HR servers that absent mindedly went into your payroll information and decided to share what your supervisors and managers were making over a beer at the local hang-out.

Could you fire them? Nope, could you ask them to sign something saying they would never disclose compensation information again? Nope. It would be an unfair and discriminatory employment practice.

What's next? Free disclosure with no recourse for the employer when your holders of confidential information decide to share employee health information with anyone they wish? I suppose.

Besides just not making business sense of any kind, this bill would be trumped by Federal law anyway. Couldn't these Democrats have spent time better? Say, maybe working toward renewable energy solutions or more revenue sources for higher education? I think so.

SB-122 was held up on its second reading, that is politico speak for "someone realized this was a dumb idea." Besides, look at the grammar and sentence structure of the bill in the last section, even that doesn't make sense to me.

There should be recourse against Carroll and Windels for wasting legislative and business time, but then they might come up with some other bill against time clocks and time management conferences.

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