Today all consultants working for my current employer received the email below (contents changed to protect the innocents):

As the old-timers among you know, I periodically ask the IT consultants the gross annual or hourly pay you receive from your respective consultant firm. This information helps us determine the salary range and level of equity among the consultants of each work type/skill set; check that the consultant firm margins are somewhat reasonable, etc. Please return e-mail (to me only) the following info:

• your gross hourly or annual rate (hourly is preferred) -whether you are working as an employee (with benefits), per diem or a corporation
• directly with or via a subcontractor firm to one of the [employer’s name] consultant firms.

When I replied asking if this was optional I received a sounding NO!

Now, I’m not a lawyer or vaguely familiar with any labor regulations out there, but.. How is this legal??? I think that besides the person in the payroll system of my company, my dad, and my wife, nobody else knows how much I make. Not legally at least! Instead of replying with some fake information (someone suggested I should write I was getting paid $200K just to see their reaction) I decided to avoid any confrontation and wait to see what happens. You see, this is my personal information and unless my employer is willing to trade my information for what exactly they’re paying my agency, I don’t see how this is of their business or how beneficial this will be to me. It is not like they’re planning on giving anyone some type of compensation for being underpaid. This really ticked me off at first but I decided that it was not worth loosing hair over it now. If the going gets rough I’m ready to defend my privacy and my rights!