Earn more! Government pay higher than private sector
And the numbers you’ll see beneath the fold does not reveal the huge disparity in benefits provided to those with public sector jobs. In 83 percent of comparable jobs, government employees make more.
From Dennis Cauchon at USA Today, who provides us with the chart.
Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.
Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.
Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.
Federal union leaders are trying to explain the disparity away by suggesting – as an example – civil engineers who work for the government have a much harder job and therefore they deserve an extra $10,000 per year.
Are they kidding?
This is not what we’ve grown up to believe during the last few decades. In general, we thought the base pay for government workers was less, but benefits were higher so things “balanced out” for the government employees. As a matter of fact, that has been the rallying cry from government unions for years.
“Stop complaining about our benefits! You have to understand, our wages are less than the private sector!”
Well I guess their going to have to rethink that argument.
Hat tip to Big Government for the pointer to USA Today.
Key findings:
- Federal. The federal pay premium cut across all job categories — white-collar, blue-collar, management, professional, technical and low-skill. In all, 180 jobs paid better average salaries in the federal government; 36 paid better in the private sector.
- Private. The private sector paid more on average in a select group of high-skill occupations, including lawyers, veterinarians and airline pilots. The government’s 5,200 computer research scientists made an average of $95,190, about $10,000 less than the average in the corporate world.
- State and local. State government employees had an average salary of $47,231 in 2008, about 5% less than comparable jobs in the private sector. City and county workers earned an average of $43,589, about 2% more than private workers in similar jobs. State and local workers have higher total compensation than private workers when the value of benefits is included.
2 Comments
The website's content and articles were migrated to a new framework in October 2023. You may see [shortcodes in brackets] that do not make any sense. Please ignore that stuff. We may fix it at some point, but we do not have the time now.
You'll also note comments migrated over may have misplaced question marks and missing spaces. All comments were migrated, but trackbacks may not show.
The site is not broken.
What I fear people fail to understand is that goverment work kills money . Pay a woman $100 to make shoes and you have a pile of shoes at the end of the day worth $150 . It is such a good deal the employer keeps hiring until the math levels off. Give a government bureocrat $100, and with few exceptions you are just handing someone $100 with nothing there at the end of the day for anyone to sell. Worse government has to pay that $100 by taking money from the shoe factory, which acts like imposing an additional employee who just sits there making no shoes for you. This imposition shortens the math spread on factory hiring . Shoe production maxes out at a lower level of personnel because of the tax. Bottom line is that it is very important to LIMIT goverment jobs to the essentials because they act like a cancer on an economy .
The best part: they get paid more, but work less efficiently (to be kind).
Serfdom has never paid so well…