Free Republic

Salaries of federal employees continue to lag behind those of similar private-sector jobs by 35 percent on average, an advisory committee has said in presenting what amounts to the latest data point in a long-running debate over how the two sectors compare. The 34.92 percent "pay gap" reported Friday essentially duplicates the 35.37 and 35.28 percent numbers reported the last two years by the Federal Salary Council and is close to those of other recent years.... Under a 1990 law, the numbers are supposed to be used to virtually close the measured differences with private-sector pay. However, no administration or...

The federal government reported Friday that on average, its employees are underpaid by 26.3 percent compared with similar non-federal jobs, a "pay gap" that increased by about 2 percentage points over last year while federal salary rates were frozen.... The pay gap in the Washington-Baltimore area was calculated at 36.9 percent, slightly below the 38.1 percent reported last year. Officials said a variety of factors could have caused that result, including changes in the mix of jobs and switching thousands of Defense Department employees into the general schedule and out of a separate pay system that is being phased out....