A century ago, in 1915, the Colorado Legislature wrote into the state’s first workers’ compensation law a provision that says any information employers provided “shall not be open to the public.”
Such a blanket provision is bad enough. But as reported in the Herald (April 12) in conjunction with Rocky Mountain PBS I-News, since then, state officials have interpreted that law to mean confidentiality must be extended to include all information on investigations of unpaid wages and other such cheating by employers.
That simply is wrong. There is no reason to hide or keep secret people – or their firms – who have broken the law. A promise of confidentiality makes sense if what is involved is personal information, true trade secrets or private financial records unrelated to the violations at issue. But if an employer is found to have broken the law with regards to unpaid wages, that action – more properly called theft or fraud – is deserving of no privacy considerations.
(Information about similar federal cases involving unpaid wages or other labor violations is readily available.)
Nor is it just about aggrieved workers. As the I-News story reported, “The secrecy protects chronic violators and the state labor departments from public scrutiny. ... It prevents business competitors, consumers and potential job candidates from being able to independently assess how often employees are taken advantage of, by whom and how well the state is doing its job of collecting unpaid wages and deterring unfair treatment.”
It also interferes with enforcement.
A new law went into effect Jan. 1 that is supposed to offer workers greater protections. Called the Wage Protection Act, it is meant to help workers who never were paid get compensation. The problem is the secrecy deemed necessary under the old law allows no way for the public or elected lawmakers to monitor its progress or effectiveness.
What is needed, of course, is to revamp the old law to reflect a contemporary respect for transparency and to take advantage of modern technology and what it can do with open data. The year 1915, after all, was of a wholly different era.
Not that modernizing the old law would shift worker relations much. Colorado remains an “at-will” state, and employers have wide latitude in hiring and firing. To effectively help some of them steal wages, however, seems a bit much.
The law should be changed to end the secrecy.
