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Did I say Right Wing group? I meant Congressional Budget Office.

Wages

Overall, the federal government paid 2 percent more in total wages than it would have if average wages had been comparable with those in the private sector, after accounting for certain observable characteristics of workers.

Benefits

On average, the benefits earned by federal civilian employees cost 48 percent more than the benefits earned by private-sector employees with certain similar observable characteristics.

Total Compensation

Overall, the federal government paid 16 percent more in total compensation than it would have if average compensation had been comparable with that in the private sector, after accounting for certain observable characteristics of workers.

Here is another thing though, at the Bachelor level and higher, the wage portion is the same or lower than the private sector. The reason is they follow a strict payscale, which scales slower than the private sector, which just pays based off current market rates for a job.

In other news, water is wet and sky is blue.

Government is always better paid than private sector. To attract the best and brightest, presumably.

feeder wrote:In other news, water is wet and sky is blue.

Government is always better paid than private sector. To attract the best and brightest, presumably.

The government union argument USED to be (and is still argued) that government workers are underpaid. Its also used as an excuse for why government work product is so...limited.

Frazzled wrote:

feeder wrote:In other news, water is wet and sky is blue.

Government is always better paid than private sector. To attract the best and brightest, presumably.

The government union argument USED to be (and is still argued) that government workers are underpaid. Its also used as an excuse for why government work product is so...limited.

Well I see no like-for-like in these figures.
Here people often say that government workers are over-paid, even though anyone who's a doctor or a nurse or any professional would get paid more in the privite sector. My dad's a pyscotherapist and if he set up a private clinic he'd be earning 3-4 times his current NHS salary.
So, yeah. Like-for-like comparison pls.
Also, I see no year or times whatsoever on OP's graph.
What years are we talking about?

Joey wrote:Well I see no like-for-like in these figures.
Here people often say that government workers are over-paid, even though anyone who's a doctor or a nurse or any professional would get paid more in the privite sector. My dad's a pyscotherapist and if he set up a private clinic he'd be earning 3-4 times his current NHS salary.
So, yeah. Like-for-like comparison pls.
Also, I see no year or times whatsoever on OP's graph.
What years are we talking about?

You could click through to the link. I didn't post the whole article because I didn't want to spam.

CBO's study compares federal civilian employees and private-sector employees with certain similar observable characteristics (described below). Even among workers with similar observable characteristics, however, employees of the federal government and the private sector may differ in other attributes, such as motivation or effort, that are not easy to measure but that can matter a great deal for individuals' compensation. This analysis focuses on wages, benefits, and total compensation between 2005 and 2010.

Yes, the correct analysis is to obviously point out how Federal Employees (although I'm sure this will get extrapolated to mean all government workers) are overpaid. A sensible person who is interested in more than getting lower middle class people to wage class warfare against middle class people would point out how the rest of the workforce has not seen any increase in real take home wages in over a decade.

The problem isn't Federal Employees. The problem is that despite massive productivity gains the average person takes home the same or less than they did decades ago.

I wonder if next biccat and others will still complain about unemployment while advocating for even more public sector employees to be laid off?

San someone ask me this. Why are we comparing to the private sector? why is american always saying private sector is the best?

hotsauceman1 wrote:San someone ask me this. Why are we comparing to the private sector? why is american always saying private sector is the best?

Because its the poor slobs in the private sector who are taxed to pay for the public employees who make more than they do.

Frazzled wrote:

hotsauceman1 wrote:San someone ask me this. Why are we comparing to the private sector? why is american always saying private sector is the best?

Because its the poor slobs in the private sector who are taxed to pay for the public employees who make more than they do.

Then they should apply for public sector jobs, driving public wages down due to demand.
y/n?

Joey wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

hotsauceman1 wrote:San someone ask me this. Why are we comparing to the private sector? why is american always saying private sector is the best?

Because its the poor slobs in the private sector who are taxed to pay for the public employees who make more than they do.

Then they should apply for public sector jobs, driving public wages down due to demand.
y/n?

N. Demand is not a factor. If it were there would already be parity.

I think some people are vastly overpaid, but then the low level government jobs really don't make much. It's the people in the upper levels (looking at you congress) that get overpaid. Heck, most people in congress can't even approve a budget so I don't know that they do anything anymore.

I'd be interested to see those numbers for purely tech-industry positions.

As a disclaimer, I've been a state government employee for the last 7 years. For the 8 years prior to that, I worked in the private sector. In my own personal experience, I've noticed three things:

1. Government employment is more stable than private employment, mostly due to unions and a tendency for the governmental body to be held accountable for their spending errors (some states are apparently better at this than others).

2. Government pay is worse than private sector pay for similar employment. I make less than half of what I was making in the private sector. This seems to hold true whenever I compare the starting salaries for equivalent private positions (thought the local ones aren't double, more like 25-50% higher).

3. Governmental benefits were supposed to be better, and up until about 6 years ago, they were. This most likely is dependent on the governmental body, but my benefits here, while reasonable, are far worse than when I was working in the private sector.

We've had all manner of grumblings here from various public people and groups about the pay of state employees. They trot out a strangely ridiculous average salary that made me finally go and look at the average salaries for the various positions in the state. As expected, when you remove the legislators and highly placed (read: appointed) management staff (none of whom are union employees BTW), you find that the average is less than half the touted number. The blue collar positions (grunt labor) do pay better than their private sector equivalent though (roughly equivalent to working at the local Home Depot here).

So, what happens to the "discussion" between state employees and vocal members of the public? Certainly not reasoned discourse where the public is pointed to the clearly inflated pay positions in the state. Instead, we get the public calling for lower wages for state employees, which the highly paid positions happily do, because it doesn't affect the people actually making the inflated salaries at all. This drives skilled labor out of governmental positions and into the private sector, and the "average" employee salary doesn't decrease, so the cycle essentially starts all over again. That angle is opposed by the non-highly paid governmental employees (read: the majority of them), and any chance at reasoned discourse is drowned in a sea of angry shouting. Bleh.

The latest thing that got proposed around here was a "salary cap" (including benefits) on union positions of $80,000. As in, no union position could make more than $80,000 a year (salary and benefits combined). Which is, of course, a non-issue, because no union employee even comes close to that.

Now, with all of that said, my information may not be typical of other states. The state of Montana (where I live and work) is one of only a few that hasn't bankrupted itself. In a state like, say, California, this may be a different kettle of fish entirely.

Should we be angry that the government doesn't underpay like the private industry does? In theory the government doesn't have intensely bloated upper management pay and the compensation trickles down more efficiently. The efficiency of the work in question is a somewhat valid argument as job safety is much higher in governmental positions, but the pay thing isn't something that ever bothered me. It just seemed like the standard that most of us would get paid if pennyworth didn't need his "job creation money".

Is people not getting fethed something we should be angry about here? I thought we were angry about trickle up pay structures last week?

Title of survey could just as easily be Left Wing Group Concludes; Private Employees are Undercompensated.

Kilkrazy wrote:Title of survey could just as easily be Left Wing Group Concludes; Private Employees are Undercompensated.

If, presumably, one did not know much about economics.

There is a fundamental difference between public and private employment. Pay rates, like every other commodity, are based on supply and demand, and so the private enterprise will tend to accurately reflect the actual price of labor. Government employment is not based on market supply and demand, but rather on political supply and demand: people demand it, the government supplies it.

Are you prepared to discuss what the "proper" pay rate is for employee X?

So what?

It's a survey by a right wing group. Of course it says that government employees are overpaid because that is a tenet of right wing dogma, i.e. that "the market" automatically sets an efficient price for everything and we should all accept that despite everything we know about markets being irrational and requiring various regulation to help make them work as rationing mechanisms.

The amusing thing is they had to cherry pick the figures to make the chart work. They chose private sector jobs that resemble public sector jobs, and ignored all the ones that don't.

So I reiterate my comment.

Kilkrazy wrote:So what?

It's a survey by a right wing group. Of course it says that government employees are overpaid because that is a tenet of right wing dogma, i.e. that "the market" automatically sets an efficient price for everything and we should all accept that despite everything we know about markets being irrational and requiring various regulation to help make them work as rationing mechanisms.

The amusing thing is they had to cherry pick the figures to make the chart work. They chose private sector jobs that resemble public sector jobs, and ignored all the ones that don't.

So I reiterate my comment.

You know what the Congressional Budget Office is, right?

Also:

They chose private sector jobs that resemble public sector jobs, and ignored all the ones that don't.

WTF?

biccat wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:Title of survey could just as easily be Left Wing Group Concludes; Private Employees are Undercompensated.

If, presumably, one did not know much about economics.

There is a fundamental difference between public and private employment. Pay rates, like every other commodity, are based on supply and demand, and so the private enterprise will tend to accurately reflect the actual price of labor.

That you think there is an actual price of labor implies a similar lack of experience in economic fields. There isn't one. There are competitive standards and practices, but there are truly few fields in America today where employee compensation buts up against the top of that "supply demand curve". To field one example, a walmart with better pay distribution between upper management and workers could pay several dollars more per hour to the majority of it's employees and maintain identical profits. That it doesn't illustrates well one of the fundamental differences between a governmental and private job. Greed.

Supply demand isn't even a particularly useful catchall term for this argument. Supply/demand really only works if you're talking about wages as they relate to employee retention and hiring.

biccat wrote:You know what the Congressional Budget Office is, right?

The chart and study come from the CBO, but they didn't make the point that 'government employees are overcompensated', that little editorial came from elsewhere.

I really don't see a silver bullet here for either fiscal champions or social champions (smaller govt/bigger govt advocates).

Salaries+Benefits at a low level of education in gov't are better because skilless labor has little intrinsic value within the US and is simply going to continue its downward slide over time. Gov't has a lot of legacy programs/employees due to bureaucratic inertia but I would guess that the amount of positions available to lower education individuals in gov't declines over time as well.

At the higher education levels, the difference is almost entirely due to benefits. I believe that's because that for recent history, government benefits have stayed unchanged in terms of scope, but the value of that scope has risen as prices have jumped. Private sector benefit packages have become leaner due to higher costs, thus lower coverage and total compensation to employees has declined.

Supply and Demand doesn't really apply to government because for the most part, its actions don't directly impact its short term revenue stream.

Supply and Demand doesn't really apply to government because for the most part, its actions don't directly impact its short term revenue stream.

It also doesn't apply to worker compensation at all.

ShumaGorath wrote:

Supply and Demand doesn't really apply to government because for the most part, its actions don't directly impact its short term revenue stream.

It also doesn't apply to worker compensation at all.

Of course it does. Labor is a commodity.

I can tell you want to hop onto the OWS bandwagon but frankly I think you're wrong. Those with valuable skills earn more, those without valuable skills earn less. In an inflationary environment where commodity prices are on the rise, it's tough for earning power to keep up with a core goods basket.

Even so, the average American pays less than 11% of their total income on food and fuel.

If you're mad about income equality, focus on closing tax loopholes and bringing accountability to the legislature.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

biccat wrote:Of course it does. Labor is a commodity.

I think it would be better to say that skilless labor is fungible; i.e. if you have nothing to differentiate yourself from an uneducated person in a nation with a far lower cost structure, then it would be borderline insane to assume that the market will come to you at your price before it exhausts all of the latter.

biccat wrote:

ShumaGorath wrote:

Supply and Demand doesn't really apply to government because for the most part, its actions don't directly impact its short term revenue stream.

It also doesn't apply to worker compensation at all.

Of course it does. Labor is a commodity.

Labor is. We're discussing compensation for labor, which is an attribute of a commodity governed by ownership with significant caveats that exist beyond a pure (and unhelpful) supply/demand consideration. Supply/demand is a boondoggle, it's not particularly useful in conversations like these because it doesn't mean anything.

I'm glad we couldn't even make it past the first page before this got conflated to include all public sector workers. Great job, everyone!

My experience moving from public sector to private sector employment is very similar to IcyCool. I left my last public sector job for a private sector job that pays twice as much and demands a lot less time and actual effort. The benefits are a little less but the money outstrips that by such a ridiculous amount that it doesn't matter.

TheHammer wrote:I'm glad we couldn't even make it past the first page before this got conflated to include all public sector workers. Great job, everyone!

My experience moving from public sector to private sector employment is very similar to IcyCool. I left my last public sector job for a private sector job that pays twice as much and demands a lot less time and actual effort. The benefits are a little less but the money outstrips that by such a ridiculous amount that it doesn't matter.

That is amazingly interesting. I have been working for the DoT (FAA directly) as a contractor for 2 years, straight out of college, and I feel that the amount I am paid is extremely fair. I could not imagine a better job in my locale. Of course, here in Oklahoma, I do have two GIANT natural gas and oil companies I could work for, Devon and Chesapeake, but took this job as they was the first to give me an interview and paid me at or over for what I was looking for.

biccat wrote:
You know what the Congressional Budget Office is, right?

The guy is from the UK, you post a thread with the title "Right-Wing Group Concludes: Federal Employees are Overcompensated" and then, hiding it up above the image with some graphs, you put "Did I say Right Wing group? I meant Congressional Budget Office. "

Fox news as trained you well.

If anything, the silly graphs show that private sector personal aren't treated equally. Probably has to do with saving money by not spending as much on your workers.

I mean I could be wrong but the CBO director is generally a lackey of some sort of the Speaker of the House, who is currently right wing, could this not still be considered a right wing organization? I know Biccat alluded otherwise but it's still in the realm of possibility and I don't follow the CBO.

AustonT wrote:I mean I could be wrong but the CBO director is generally a lackey of some sort of the Speaker of the House, who is currently right wing, could this not still be considered a right wing organization? I know Biccat alluded otherwise but it's still in the realm of possibility and I don't follow the CBO.

They're usually pretty good about not swinging towards the party not in presidents office. They've been friendly to the cost of obama bills.