I don't think this has anything to do with unions. Georgia has a similar website (and Georgia is mostly anti-union). I think it has more to do with being a check-and-balance when dealing with people who are being paid with public money. You often hear about those scandals where public employees gave themselves and their friends huge salaries and bonuses; I think these websites are there to expose those types of fraud. It's no different than top executives at public (public as in stock listed, rather than gov't owned) having to disclose their compensation packages. People in a position of power have a tendency to abuse that power. There needs to be transparency in these cases.
> It's no different than top executives at public (public as in stock listed, rather than gov't owned) having to disclose their compensation packages.
Except it is different in that _all_ employees are listed by name with their salary. A lowly Programmer Analyst II has no ability to determine anyone's salary, much less his own, yet is listed by full name.
Granted, I have worked in government and seen first hand that when leadership changes, suddenly there are a ton of new hires (all the friends of the new leader), so this kind of tool could be useful to make sure these new hires aren't paid over-generously. It seems like that duty could be handled by an internal auditing agency, which would have access to individual names, whereas the public would just see the range/mean/stddev for each position title.
