Very passionate op-ed in Wednesday’s Boston Globe by local labor union exec Mark Erlich about the public-sector-union dustup kick started in Wisconsin:
Wisconsin is only the most dramatic site of a broader strategy of absolving Wall Street and scapegoating public employees and their unions. While there are legitimate and critical public policy issues about education reform, spiraling health costs, and pension liabilities at a time of state and municipal budget deficits, why is the fault laid at the feet of teachers, police, and firefighters? Today’s pension obligations are the product of massive investment losses, not excessively generous public pensions that, in fact, average about $19,000 a year. For that matter, a 2010 Economic Policy Institute study showed that, controlled for educational achievement, public sector workers actually earn less than their private sector counterparts.
Except for these numbers from a recent Weekly Standard piece by the always readable Andrew Ferguson:
A USA Today story last month [reported], “Federal employees’ average compensation . . . has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn.” The figures from an analysis by the newspaper’s Dennis Cauchon were jaw-dropping. Over the last decade, the average federal salary has risen 33 percent faster than the inflation rate. When total compensation is measured—salary plus benefits like health insurance and pension guarantees—government workers have seen an increase of more than 36 percent, adjusted for inflation. Over the same period, private workers got an 8.8 percent increase. The result: Average private sector compensation is $61,051; the average federal compensation is $129,049.
So whose numbers do you believe? Dial 1-800-CAMPOUT to register your vote.
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Do the studies adjust for educational level?
The educational level of public employees is higher than the educational level of workers in general. Consider this analysis by Ezra Klein, which claims that public workers face a compensation penalty of 5% for choosing to work in the public sector.
I’m pretty sure both the Globe and Weekly Standard ones did.
Really? I don’t see where they did… OTOH, I’m on vacation and I might not be reading/thinking clearly 🙂
The Globe piece said it right in the quote I posted. And here’s the Weekly Standard:
President Obama’s former budget chief, Peter Orszag, acknowledged the apparent pay advantage, or pay premium, enjoyed by the feds. But he said the difference was inflated by the workers’ average education and skill levels, which are higher in the federal government than in the private labor force. So the conservative economists Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine ran the numbers again, controlling for the higher educational attainment and skill level of federal employees. They discovered that federal workers still received a premium of 24 percent over similarly trained private workers.
Enjoy your vacation.
Notice how the first quotation states “controlled for education” while the second nowhere controls for this important variable? The key is that so many public sector jobs require a bachelor’s degree (or higher) — and even continuing education, such as for teachers — while so many private sector jobs do not.
Well… since you will only consider the evidence if it’s published in one of the New York newspapers, maybe you will also consider the evidence as analyzed by the Times.
Remember: as a journalist you don’t have to include two sides to a story if one side shows a clear systematic error or bias that undermines its argument.
Feeling a bit school-marmish, are we, Michael? I’m just putting these out there for splendid readers like you to draw their own conclusions. Not necessarily making them myself.
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