Unlike most articles about the "$100,000 club", this one actually acknowledges (in the last couple of paragraphs) the fact that the value of $100,000 has changed over the years, so the absolute number of people earning over $100,000 isn't fully informative.
But it would be great at this point if they could do the research and analysis necessary to make the data fully informative.
What would the threshold be if you indexed it for inflation? How many people would be above the threshold then? What percentage of the public service is over the threshold, and how has that number evolved over time? How does the growth in the number of public servants over the threshold compare with population growth in Ontario as a whole? How does it compare with the number of people in the private sector over the threshold? How does it compare with the number of people below the poverty line?
I'll get you started. Public Sector Salary Disclosure was introduced in 1996. According to the Bank of Canada inflation calculator, $100,000 in 1996 dollars is equal to $131,214.53 in 2010 dollars. Of the first 10 names on the first list, only 3 earned more than $131,214.53.
Based on this initial, unskilled perusal, it seems like a more in-depth analysis may well be informative. It would be really helpful if some journalists, who no doubt have the ability and resources to find and contextualize all the data, could make sense of it all for us.
2 comments:
It would also be nice if the profession of journalism would pay decently and furnish decent working conditions so writers could do that necessary and important work. But alas.
Hell yeah! I can't do it myself because I need to work, so the people who do it as their job shouldn't have the same problem
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