Posted on 05/19/2006 4:25:10 PM PDT by lauriehelds
The pay gap between private and public sector employees seems to be a given. Just this week, 10 congressmen made their case for a higher 2007 civilian pay raise than President Bush has requested by citing a 30 percent private-public gap reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"The federal government may never be able to compete with the private sector, dollar for dollar, but we must ensure that we do not fall further behind in the battle for talent," Reps. Tom Davis, R-Va.; Jon Porter, R-Nev.; Steny Hoyer, D-Md.; Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and others said in a letter to fellow members.
But a new paper from the libertarian Washington-based think tank the Cato Institute argues that the pay gap actually travels in the other direction. Pointedly titled "Federal Pay Outpaces Private-Sector Pay," the paper by Chris Edwards, the institute's director of tax policy studies, makes the case for freezing government salaries.
By bundling federal benefits -- including defined pensions, the Thrift Savings Plan and health care subsidies -- together with wages, Edwards calculated that the average federal worker earned $100,178 in 2004, compared to $51,876 in salary and benefits for the average private-sector worker. Those numbers were based on statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
"The federal civilian workforce has become an elite island of secure and high-paid workers, separated from the ocean of private-sector American workers who must compete in today's dynamic economy," Edwards wrote.
In an interview, Edwards said he is trying to stir the pot on an issue that has no real adversaries. Federal employee unions are so vocal on pay issues, and Washington-area congressmen, including Republicans like Davis, who chairs the Government Reform Committee, are loyal to the many federally employed voters in their districts, Edwards said.
He said he suspects the BLS studies that find such a marked pay gap, and which do not take benefits into account, are flawed.
"There are questions about how these comparisons are done," Edwards said. "If you, say, look at a government lawyer versus a private lawyer, or accountants, the responsibilities and the hours worked per week can be quite radically different."
Most compelling, he argued, is the quit rate for federal employees, which is quite low and suggests that workers are satisfied with their pay.
Edwards said in his paper that some academic studies have found government workers to be overpaid, but his citation is a 1985 study by Steven Venti at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Why did he pull from a 20-year-old study? Because, he said, there has been so much agreement in recent years on the pay gap that no one has bothered to complete an updated independent analysis.
That's not true. The fed govt goes through reductions in workforce quite often, as budgets/priorities change.
Employees are given the chance to move to another job in another location as a first resort (if a job is available, there are no guarantees. I did it three times in ten years), or be separated from federal service.
Right now the government workforce is undergoing A-76 where fed employees are bidding against the private sector for federal jobs.
At the same time in CONUS that would be 5 days. In Viet Nam you couldn't take just a week like that. In Korea there were other stipulations. Friends of mine in the Air Force (which goes all over the world) were allowed to take it a day at a time, and if they had had the opportunity, most of the year they'd been on a 4 day workweek.
Interesting, I've known thousands of former USPS employees.
An interesting exercise...I would bet that if you took the dead center median of lawyers that salary would come out about the same. But the thing is, my point of view may be inaccurate because I live in NYC, so lawyers would tend to earn more than in other geographic areas.
Interesting, I've known thousands of former USPS employees.
You need to expand your range of friends.
BTW, USPS only has a dozen or so bombs go off per year ~ low risk I am certain ~
True. But if I only take leave on weekdays and don't combine with weekends or Holidays.. it's 30 days paid vacation per year.
I even know private sector people who quit their jobs.
It was just a joke, I apologize.
Thanks, I work for the State of Wisconsin. When I was in a position responsible for purchasing, I reminded the folks requesting new equipment fairly often that we needed to get as good a price as possible, because we were spending taxpayer money (including taxes we paid). I think it helped my division hold the line.
Sick leave can be converted to help pay insurance premiums, and our vacation time can be "banked" into sabbatical, to be taken when we retire. I took a state job for the bennies - hubby was self-employed, and we had young children. I keep it because I like the people I work with, and the bennies are still good. I like to think I provide value. It is true that not everyone has the same attitude toward taxpayers' largesse.
Remember the draft? That was because the Congress forgot to provide a living wage for folks in their first two years of military service.
That's another "tax" I've paid that most other Americans haven't.
Is anyone working out there? Hunh? Everybody off on vacation, balancing the budget on the letter carrier's pay packet, working soldiers day and night ~ what a country eh?!
The salaries are inflated in NYC because of competition for talent. Talent in many fields gets bid up to outrageous and humorous levels. But that talent has the potential to directly add to the bottomline.
NYC is different than rural areas. No better or worse, just different. I could write a book on the contrasts...
Their experience is not par for the course, no matter what they tell you.
Right now, employees have been pared to the point diseconomies of scale are happening all over the government. Lawyers are doing ok because of all the lawsuits various agencies are dealing with, constantly, like the Forest Service, who can't spit without a green organization suing them.
So instead of getting work done, resources are tied up in responding to endless demands for this, restraint on that, EIS demands, and so forth.
While that is going on, they are cutting the clerks who deal with customers at places like SS, so it will take even more time to get an appointment, or have a question answered or get your name changed on a SS card, unless you do it through the internet or mail. While that is going on, there are not enough employees in ICE to fight both illegal immigration and terrorism. While that is going on, the emergency reponse capability for wildland fire and natural disaster is being compromised by letting the emergency response management teams attrition away through retirement, and not having enough replacements coming up to replace them.
While all this is going on, government services are getting harder to get because of "competitive sourcing" and elimination of enough jobs that those who actually knew the answers have retired, quit, been outsourced or jumped ship.
Competitive sourcing, btw, is going to cost the taxpayer more money for less service, but it will go directly into the private sector, even if the quality of service is worse and the price is more per action.
Everytime something goes under competitive sourcing, even if the government agency wins, they have to cut costs by about 30 percent, so there are jobs eliminated and fewer people to answer your questions, process your forms, handle your permit applications or whatever it is the agency does. Instead, you might find your question eventually being answered by a calling center miles from where you are at.
And if the private sector wins the contract and they turn out to be a bad deal, there is no going back to the public sector, because all those people have lost their jobs and have moved on.
This has ramifications. The person who might help you might not be able to because his computer is down and it can take weeks, sometimes, to get an adequate replacement, or enough help from computer support to troubleshoot the problem.
And a lot of these people are, myth to the contrary, not slackers, but hard workers who work understaffed, with constant threat of their job positions being eliminated, and often in specialized technical areas such as fire behavior science or remote sensing or other specialized capabilities.
So one day, when the wildfire comes to your door, and there is no one to fight it, well, they downsized so that no one can be crew boss or incident commander or safety officer (since these are part time jobs that used to be funded by the Forest Service and the BLM, but there are not enough jobs left to keep them employed full time, so they moved on) to organize the team that would have protected your home. Or if you have to wait a month to begint to talk to someone about what's going wrong with your disabled mom's social security application, or why many of those other services we depend on from the government, like watershed protection, free weather information, flood protection, or even receiving the payment you earned from work done for the government isn't getting done.
Bad service, diseconomies of scale, parks closed, forests filled with dead trees and noxious weeds, and all those things that people asked for to happen just because of the myth of the lazy slacker public servant.
Really, thousands? I have never met one unless you count the part time seasonals they bring on.
Fur Shur the private sector folks in the DC area were also put on notice when the smoke from the Pentagon settled down around their homes and businesses, but there was no doubt who was targeted.
Why would anyone want to live in NYC? City Income Tax, State Income Tax, Outrageous Sales taxes on every thing you buy. Not for me!
Consider moving to Texas, Florida, Nevada....all high growth states with NO STATE INCOME TAX.
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