Posted on 04/11/2011 3:26:07 PM PDT by Got Long Form?
Republican leaders in Congress think so, and they are calling for an overhaul of the entire federal pay system to help slash government spending.
Democrats and other defenders of the government work force say federal workers are actually underpaid compared with their private counterparts.
A closer look at the data shows that both sides have a point but that supporters of federal workers are a bit closer to reality....
That argument is backed up by a 2002 study of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It found that federal salaries for most professional and administrative jobs lagged well behind compensation offered in the private sector.
The CBO study concluded that the best way to measure the difference is to compare government jobs with those in the private sector that match the actual work performed. The CBO found that salaries for 85 percent of federal workers in professional and administrative jobs lagged their private sector counterparts by more than 20 percent.
Among lawyers, for example, the average pay in the federal government was about $127,500 a year in 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average lawyer in the private sector earned $137,540. And the starting salary at large law firms in Washington, D.C. -- where most government lawyers work -- is $160,000, and can grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, according to the National Association for Law Placement....
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
I wonder what indispensable, over-achieving, underpaid government department he works in.
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