PEP, May 2011: City workers: far from fat cats

Public Employee Press

City workers: far from fat cats

As conservatives carry out their nationwide campaign against government services, they call public employees a "new elite" with excessive pay, pensions and benefits.

The right-wingers want to weaken public-sector unions so they can pit public service workers against already-suppressed private-sector compensation.

But they have the facts wrong.

"Municipal Employee Compensation in New York," a study released March 9 by city Comptroller John C. Liu, shows that city employees get an average of 17 percent less pay than their private-sector counterparts.

The study raises important policy questions:

Would the public want government to match arbitrary, harsh or exploitative private-sector labor practices?
If you want to provide your children with a strong education, don't you need to pay your teachers and support staff well?
Are you so concerned about rock-bottom taxes that you wouldn't pay your public employees enough to afford decent housing and help their kids with their education?

Another finding of the report is that New York City employees are generally better educated than their private sector counterparts. Forty-nine percent of municipal employees have bachelor's degrees or higher, compared to 41 percent of the workers in the city's private, for-profit sector.

Public-sector workers with less education tend to be more highly paid and have better benefits than similar workers in the private sector. More highly-educated workers in the public sector are generally paid less than their counterparts in the private-sector. In effect, professional employees in the public-sector are trading off comparatively low wages for benefits, such as traditional pension and health-care coverage without employee contributions.

The study found smaller differences between higher and lower wages in city government than among private-sector firms. There is less of an income gap in the highly unionized public sector, which promotes greater equality than the less unionized business sector.

— Gregory N. Heires