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Study says public employees still under paid
A Rutgers University professor 'debunks' the right's constant criticism
Download:
EPIreport.pdf
Take a look at the following paragraph:
Several governors have identified excessive public employee compensation as a major cause of their states' fiscal duress. The remedies they propose include public employee pay freezes, benefits reductions, privatization, major revisions to the rules of collective bargaining and constitutional amendments to limit pay increases, each as a necessary antidote to the supposed public employee overpayment malady.
Sound familiar? It should, because you've heard much the same thing from our current Oregon governor, candidates to succeed him and countless aspirants for other offices.
But a major national report released recently says a statistical analysis of all public employees, in both state and local government, yields this conclusion: public employees are not overpaid, and in fact, all told, are slightly underpaid relative to their counterparts in the private sector.
Specifically, the report found:
One of those scholars is Jeffrey Keefe, an associate professor of labor and employment relations at Rutgers University. Keefe is the primary author of Debunking the Myth of the Overcompensated Public Employee, the EPI report referenced above.
Keefe's report, 14 pages including references and an appendix, covers a variety of topics, some frequently reported on, but others often overlooked. For example:
A full PDF version of Debunking the Myth of the Overcompensated Public Employee is attached to this article. More about the Economic Policy Institute is available at the EPI website.
http://www.oregonafscme.com/docs/EPIreport.pdf
A Rutgers University professor 'debunks' the right's constant criticism
Download:
EPIreport.pdfTake a look at the following paragraph:
Several governors have identified excessive public employee compensation as a major cause of their states' fiscal duress. The remedies they propose include public employee pay freezes, benefits reductions, privatization, major revisions to the rules of collective bargaining and constitutional amendments to limit pay increases, each as a necessary antidote to the supposed public employee overpayment malady.
Sound familiar? It should, because you've heard much the same thing from our current Oregon governor, candidates to succeed him and countless aspirants for other offices.
But a major national report released recently says a statistical analysis of all public employees, in both state and local government, yields this conclusion: public employees are not overpaid, and in fact, all told, are slightly underpaid relative to their counterparts in the private sector.
Specifically, the report found:
- Overall, U.S. public employees are under-compensated by an average of 3.7 percent relative to private sector counterparts.
- Local government employees do better relatively, and are under-compensated by 1.8 percent.
- State employees, in contrast, are under-compensated to the tune of 7.6 percent.
One of those scholars is Jeffrey Keefe, an associate professor of labor and employment relations at Rutgers University. Keefe is the primary author of Debunking the Myth of the Overcompensated Public Employee, the EPI report referenced above.
Keefe's report, 14 pages including references and an appendix, covers a variety of topics, some frequently reported on, but others often overlooked. For example:
- Public employees are, on average, more highly educated than private sector employees. That means the "typical" public employee may indeed make more than the "typical" private worker if you don't line them up in an apples-to-apples comparison. In other words, all of the minimum wage earners in the private sector are logically going to drag down the private sector's average wage. However, state and local government pays its college-educated labor 25 percent less than the private sector pays its college-educated labor. And the earnings differential is even higher for professional class employees, doctors and lawyers.
- Given the findings above, Keefe notes that public jurisdictions may in fact want to look at reverse contracting out, saying that the earnings differential between college-educated private and public sector employees "may create opportunities for cost savings by reviewing professional outsourcing contracts to examine what work might be performed by lower cost public employees."
- Benefits are simply allocated differently between private and public sector full-time workers. State and local government employees receive a higher percentage of their overall compensation in the form of benefits than do their private sector counterparts (which means the wage difference between the two is even more striking). But again, when it comes to overall compensation — wages and benefits — public employees remain slightly under-compensated.
A full PDF version of Debunking the Myth of the Overcompensated Public Employee is attached to this article. More about the Economic Policy Institute is available at the EPI website.
http://www.oregonafscme.com/docs/EPIreport.pdf
