Unions and Government Worker Pay
Yesterday, USA Today examined the average pay advantage of state and local government workers over workers in the private sector. The article found, for example, that government workers in California earned an average $71,385 in compensation in 2009, or $7,977 more than the average for private sector workers in that state.
Are these government worker pay advantages related to union shares in the states? I performed a simple regression analysis to find out. The answer is “Yes”—states with more unionized government workforces tend to have a higher government compensation advantage.
The chart below shows the regression results, including the raw data (one blue dot for each state) and the regression-fitted line (pink dots). As the union share increases, the pink line indicates that the average government pay advantage increases. In particular, the pink line indicates that for every 10 percentage point increase in a state’s union share, the average government worker pay advantage increases by $765 annually.
Let’s apply these results to Wisconsin, which has a union share of about 50 percent in its state and local workforce. Suppose that Wisconsin makes legal reforms resulting in the union share falling to 10 percent. The regression indicates that the decline would save Wisconsin taxpayers about $3,060 annually for every state and local worker, or about $872 million in total annual workforce costs for the state. (The state has 285,000 state/local workers).
(The regression was statistically significant at the 95% level, with an F-statistic of 5.9 and a T-statistic on the union share variable of 2.4. The R-square was 11 percent, which indicates that union share explains only a modest portion of the overall government pay advantages between the states).
Furor over Government Employees
Concern about the pay, benefits, and performance of government employees seems to be growing. Chris Edwards’s articles on how government pay is outpacing private-sector pay have generated media attention, cartoons, and angry rebuttals from the head of the federal Office of Personnel Management. Steven Greenhut has a new book, Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation, and is writing lots of newspaper articles on the high costs of government unions, also the topic of a recent Cato Policy Analysis. New Jersey unions are not finding much sympathy as they try to hold on to their raises, benefits, pensions, and work rules in the face of Gov. Chris Christie’s attempt to cut the budget. Liberal journalist Mickey Kaus is running for the U.S. Senate, trying to warn California’s voters and the Democratic Party about the excessive power and destructive influence of public employee unions.
And now Saturday Night Live. The zeitgeist-riding comedy show had a truly harsh sketch this weekend about the “Public Employee of the Year Awards.” It touched every element of popular resentment toward government workers: “people with government jobs are just like workers everywhere – except for the lifetime job security, guaranteed annual raises, early retirement on generous pensions, and full medical coverage with no deductibles, office visit fees, or copayments” — “retirement on full disability” by an obviously young and healthy worker — “Surliest and Least Cooperative State Employee” — “3200 hours [a year] on the job, all of it overtime” — New York school janitors living in Florida — employees with two current jobs and full disability — an entire workday at the DMV without serving a single customer — no-work contracts – surprisingly early closings — and “he’s on break.”
Time for unions to start worrying?
Tuesday Links
- Should the President be considered “America’s Daddy“? (Not unless you think all American people should be treated like children…)
- Cato President Ed Crane on Tucker Carlson’s new site, “The Daily Caller.”
- More bad news for Blackwater.
- Podcast: “Government Workers’ Padded Paychecks” featuring Chris Edwards.
Wednesday Links
- Nat Hentoff reports on racism in Cuba.
- Federal judge dismisses charges against Blackwater guards over the killing of 17 in Baghdad. David Isenberg: “The fact that the Blackwater contractors are not getting a trial will only serve to further increase suspicion of and hostility towards security contractors. It is going to be even more difficult for them to gain the trust of local populations or government officials in the countries they work in.”
- New report shows state and local government workers have higher average compensation levels than private workers.
- Podcast: “Televising and Subsidizing the Big Game” featuring Neal McCluskey. “Everybody should watch the National College Football Championship because whether you’re interested or not, you are paying for it,” he says.
State Budgets and Employee Compensation
Today, Cato released a report on employee compensation in state and local governments. As states struggle to balance their budgets in coming months, they should look to find savings in employee compensation, which represents half of all state and local spending.
The particular issue of excessive state pensions is being probed by newspapers across the nation. Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie discusses the problem in his home state of Ohio. That state’s newspapers teamed up to pen a series of articles on government pensions, which are representative of the growing pension problems in many states.
There has been a parallel series of articles across the nation on “pay-to-play” state pension scandals. These scandals involve Wall Street firms bribing public officials to get a slice of the government’s financial business. There is pay-to-play corruption in California and pay-to-play corruption in New York and many other places.
The solution to both of these problems is the same: moving the nation’s 20 million state and local workers from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans. That way, governments wouldn’t have to hold giant pools of pension investments, the benefit structure of government workers would be more transparent, and policymakers could more easily cut compensation to balance state budgets.
Perceptions of Government Pay
A new poll by Rasmussen finds that the general public has an accurate assessment of government worker pay.
Compared to the average government worker, most Americans think they work harder, have less job security and make less money.
In fact, 59% of Americans say the average government worker earns more annually than the average taxpayer, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 15% don’t believe that to be true, while another 26% are not sure.
Among those who have close friends or relatives who work for the government, the belief is even stronger: 61% say the average government worker earns more than the average taxpayer.
Feeding that belief is the finding that 51% of all adults think government workers are paid too much. Only 10% say they are paid too little, while 27% say their pay is about right.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data indeed shows that government workers work fewer hours in a year and have much higher job security than private sector workers. And I’ve argued that they are generally overpaid, and by increasing amounts.
For more, check out:
Government and GDP
The expansion in government and poor state of the economy got me thinking about how government growth is reflected in measured gross domestic product. So here is a wonky look at the treatment of government in the Bureau of Economic Analysis GDP data.
Data notes: By “government,” I mean total federal, state, and local. For 2009, I’m using the average of second and third quarter data. All data from BEA Tables here.
GDP measures total production. In 2009, government production was 20.7 percent of U.S. GDP. Government production is roughly the sum of government value-added (the stuff it produces itself) and government purchases. The first item, government value-added, was 12.4 percent of GDP and mainly consists of employee compensation. For example, the Pentagon produces output by adding together fighter pilots, which it hires, and fighter jets, which it buys.
A more commonly cited measure of government is total government spending. In 2009, that was 38 percent of GDP. The difference between this number (38 percent) and the production number (20.7 percent) is 17.3 percent, and represents the sum of government interest payments and transfer payments to individuals and businesses.
Figure 1 shows how the three measurements of government size have changed over time. Government production has remained fairly stable as a share of the economy, but total government spending has soared. The growing gap between these two lines mainly represents the massive growth in transfer (or subsidy) programs, such as Social Security.
Your Tax Dollars at Work
The National Park Service announced Friday that it has removed its superintendent at Gettysburg National Military Park and reassigned him to work in a cultural resources office as an assistant to the associate director. His job duties have not yet been determined.
John A. Latschar said Thursday that his demotion was in response to the public disclosure of Internet activity in which he viewed more than 3,400 “sexually-explicit” images over a two-year period on his government computer — a violation of department policy. The misconduct, which Latschar acknowledged in a sworn statement, was found during a year-long investigation by the Interior Department’s inspector general and was documented in an internal Aug. 7 report obtained by The Washington Post.
The reassignment came after a Post report Monday about the results of the investigator’s forensic analysis of Latschar’s computer hard drive, which showed “significant inappropriate user activity” and numbered the “most sexually-explicit” images at 3,456….
David Barna, spokesman for the National Park Service, said Latschar’s annual salary of $145,000 and his pension will not be affected. The cultural resources office is based in Washington, but Latschar will commute from his home in Gettysburg to a Park Service office about 30 miles away in Frederick, Barna said.
Hey, can I get that deal? If I download 3,500 pornographic images on my office computer, can I get reassigned to a telecommuting job with no defined duties at my current salary and pension? As superintendent of a very visible national park, Latschar had a job with a lot of pressure, lots of criticism, management challenges, etc. Now he’s going to be some sort of undefined “assistant to an associate director in a cultural resources office,” but he won’t have to actually go to the cultural resources office, and he’ll still get the same pay and benefits he was getting for doing a real, stressful job. Does anyone in the federal government ever get fired?
Federal Pay Continues Rapid Ascent
The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released its annual data on compensation levels by industry (Tables 6.2D, 6.3D, and 6.6D here). The data show that the pay advantage enjoyed by federal civilian workers over private-sector workers continues to expand.
The George W. Bush years were very lucrative for federal workers. In 2000, the average compensation (wages and benefits) of federal workers was 66 percent higher than the average compensation in the U.S. private sector. The new data show that average federal compensation is now more than double the average in the private sector.
Figure 1 looks at average wages. In 2008, the average wage for 1.9 million federal civilian workers was $79,197, which compared to an average $50,028 for the nation’s 108 million private sector workers (measured in full-time equivalents). The figure shows that the federal pay advantage (the gap between the lines) is steadily increasing.
Figure 2 shows that the federal advantage is even more pronounced when worker benefits are included. In 2008, federal worker compensation averaged a remarkable $119,982, which was more than double the private sector average of $59,909.
What is going on here? Members of Congress who have large numbers of federal workers in their districts relentlessly push for expanding federal worker compensation. Also, the Bush administration had little interest in fiscal restraint, and it usually got rolled by the federal unions. The result has been an increasingly overpaid elite of government workers, who are insulated from the economic reality of recessions and from the tough competitive climate of the private sector.
It’s time to put a stop to this. Federal wages should be frozen for a period of years, at least until the private-sector economy has recovered and average workers start seeing some wage gains of their own. At the same time, gold-plated federal benefit packages should be scaled back as unaffordable given today’s massive budget deficits. There are many qualitative benefits of government work—such as extremely high job security—so taxpayers should not have to pay for such lavish government pay packages.
Update: I respond to some criticisms of this post here.
Update 2: Compensation data for federal workers vs. other industries here.
Update 3: In September, the government revised the data for private sector workers. On 9/30/09, Figure 1 and the related text were updated to reflect this change.
Those Who “Serve” Us Celebrate
Those who think that the college-educated, or soon to be so, should have more and more of their education funded by taxpayers – whether those taxpayers themselves attended college or not – are shooting off the fireworks a bit early this year, celebrating increasingly generous federal aid going into effect today.
Perhaps the most galling part of all the increasingly free-flowing aid is how much is being targeted at people who work in “public service.” Ignoring for the moment that the people who make our computers, run our grocery stores, play professional baseball, and on and on are all providing the public with things it wants and needs, to make policy on the assumption that people in predominantly government jobs are somehow selflessly sacrificing for the common good is to blatantly disregard reality.
Consider teachers, as I have done in-depth. According to 2007 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, adjusted to reflect actual time worked, teachers earn more on an hourly basis than accountants, registered nurses, and insurance underwriters. Elementary school teachers – the lowest paid among elementary, middle, and high school educators – made an average of $35.49 an hour, versus $32.91 for accountants and auditors, $32.54 for RNs, and $31.31 for insurance underwriters.
So much for the notion that teachers get paid in nothing but children’s smiles and whatever pittance a cruel public begrudgingly permits them.
How about government employees?
Chris Edwards has done yeoman’s work pointing out how well compensated federal bureaucrats are, noting that in 2007 the average annual wage of a federal civilian employee was $77,143, versus $48,035 for the average private sector worker. And when benefits were factored in, federal employee compensation was twice as large as private sector. But don’t just take Chris’s word and data to see that federal employment is far from self-sacrificial – take the Washington Post’s “Jobs” section!
And it’s not just federal employees or teachers who are making some pretty pennies serving John Q. Public. As a recent Forbes article revealed, it’s people at all levels of government, from firefighters to municipal clerks:
In public-sector America things just get better and better. The common presumption is that public servants forgo high wages in exchange for safe jobs and benefits. The reality is they get all three. State and local government workers get paid an average of $25.30 an hour, which is 33% higher than the private sector’s $19, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Throw in pensions and other benefits and the gap widens to 42%.
Recently, my wife and I have been watching the HBO miniseries John Adams, and I couldn’t help but make the observation: In Adams’ time, many of those who served the public truly did so at great expense to themselves, often risking their very lives and asking little, if anything, from the public in return. Today, in contrast, many if not most of those who supposedly serve the public do so at no risk to themselves – indeed, unparalleled security is one of the great benefits of their employment – but are treated as if their jobs are extraordinary sacrifices. And so, as we head into Independence Day, it seems the World has once again been turned upside down: In modern America, the public works mightily to serve its servants, not the other way around.
Taxpayers and the Federal Diary
The Federal Diary column in the Washington Post is a curious piece of newspaper real estate. Most newspaper columns are aimed at the broad general public, but this column is aimed directly at the few hundred thousand government workers in the DC region. The result is that it takes a very government- and union-centric view of the world. The fact that the federal civilian workforce costs taxpayers an enormous $300 billion or so every year is beside the point for the column.
In a briefing with reporters yesterday, the head of the Office of Personnel Management complained about a Lou Dobbs television bit that featured this data that I assembled from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The Federal Diary columnist called me yesterday about the data, and I explained to him the shortcomings of the OPM claims that federal workers are underpaid.
Unfortunately, the Federal Diary today simply parrots the OPM’s claims, calling the Dobbs/Edwards/BEA data “misleading.” Yet this data clearly shows that federal compensation has taken off like a rocket this decade.
Today’s column, like many of the Federal Diary columns, is about how to improve the pay, benefits, and working conditions of federal workers. What about the taxpayers who foot the bill? To provide some balance, the Post ought to at least have a side-by-side column entitled “Federal Taxpayers’ Diary.”
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