commissioner.org
| Source | Yoshie Furuhashi |
| Date | 06/09/04/23:29 |
| www.nytimes.com
September 3, 2006 The Flush Are Working for the Public By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH FOR years it has been a workplace truism: jobs with fat paychecks are found in the private sector, while jobs with ho-hum pay but rock-solid benefits are found with the government. But research by the Employee Benefit Research Institute suggests that the truism has not been true for some time. As of June 2005, overall compensation costs were 46 percent higher for state and local governments than for private-sector employers, according to the institute's research analyst, Ken McDonnell. And when Mr. McDonnell separated the cost of providing current pay from the cost of providing benefits, he found that government employees were doing better on both counts. An hour's worth of their work cost governments $24.17 in wages and salaries, plus $11.29 in benefits. An hour's worth of work in the private sector cost employers $17.21 for wages and salaries, plus $7.03 for benefits. The $11.22-per-hour compensation gap reflects big differences in the composition of America's work force. Roughly half of all state and local workers are employed in education — teachers, university professors and others who tend to be well educated and to belong to unions. The cost of compensating workers in that group was $37.99 per hour, Mr. McDonnell found. By contrast, the biggest block of jobs in the private sector is in services — a mixed bag that includes both lawyers and hotel chambermaids, few of them in unions. Even at the high end, $27.93 per hour, this group's total compensation cost fell short of what the educators could command. At the low end, it was just $10.84 an hour. (Of course, the services group includes about 47 million people and so the relatively few mega-earners don't do much to raise the average.) |
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