It's not the big bucks. It's the four to six weeks vacation, generous health benefits, and defined benefit pension. All benefits that largely do not exist any more in the private sector.
I recall getting 13 days per year for many years. Then it was 20 days, and then 26 days. However, no one that I can recall getting 30 days vacation out of the feds.
You get longer and longer vacations the more years you work.
Still, this seemingly generous vacation time is dramatically reduced from the 3 full months the federales got up until the draining of the swamps in and around DC.
In Abe Lincoln's time they used to shut down DC in the summer lest all the people die of disease.
A large chunk of your federal workforce consists of USPS employees, and they generally are not allowed to take any vacation time from roughly late October until mid January.
Within living memory, Postal workers were forced to work on Christmas Day.
Best deal on vacations was negotiated by AFL-CIO's UAW division. My father usually got a minimum of 12 weeks vacation during re-tooling in the Summer.
Bet the information in this article was put together primarily by a Washington DC lawyer with his own private parking space (no Metro rides for that class, eh!), who makes an awful lot more working for a lobbyist than doing an honest job down at the courthouse.
'nuff said.
I've been on both sides of the federal vs. private industry wall. In the type of work I do, the pay is very similar (though that varies considerably from one part of government to another). I'm back up to 3 weeks of vacation (down from 4 in the private sector), health benefits are weaker at dot-gov, and the pension is a defined contribution plan. In the private industry, I had a defined benefit pension.
Unfortunately, we are among the feds that still have to pay into social security.
Nope!
It IS the big bucks, the low performance expectations, the twisted accounting practices....AND everything you mentioned