Look through the charts, and there are some employment categories you won’t see:
Last year, Colorado companies and organizations submitted detailed wage and employment information on more than 2.1 million workers. But data on 96,475 of those workers – about 4.5 percent – was partially cloaked by economists at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Why?
To guard against industrial espionage.
The bureau says it fiercely protects the confidentiality of the nation’s employers. Government economists even guard the calculations by which they choose to disclose information such as average industry wages and total employment, said the bureau’s Mike Buso.
This suppression most often occurs when a company or an organization becomes the only player – or a dominant player – in a category.
Here’s what the government fears: If the data from that category were to be released, smaller companies could calculate the wage and employment statistics of a far-larger competitor by subtracting their own payroll information.
And if only one company exists in a category? Releasing that data would be akin to directly publishing confidential company data – or so the government reasons.
Despite this, data from “cloaked” industries are pooled into broader categories – and included in the statewide statistics such as number of employees and average wages.
What can confound national observers is when employment categories go dark and appear again, for no apparent reason. In 2003, for example, discount retailers disclosed average pay of $17,020.
The bureau’s attitude is “you have to trust us,” said Paul Schacht, manager of the wage census for the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
After some prodding, bureau economists recently agreed to share their secret suppression-calculation methods with officials in Colorado and the other states.
But the bureau’s Buso questions how many state economists will bother to do the complex math.
Staff writer Aldo Svaldi can be reached at 303-820-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com.
