This month, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual look at compensation by region, by employer, by occupation, by just about any way you want to slice or dice it. Here's what it shows for Hampton Roads, as of July 2009:
The average full-time state and local government worker in our region earned $23.46 per hour. The average private sector worker made $18.87.
You might pass that off as an artifact of differences in the labor force of the two — that the private sector has, for example, more low-end service jobs. And there's an element of that. But the BLS handily provides numbers by occupation, so you can line up apples with apples.
And when you look many of them, government workers have the advantage. Take secretaries and administrative assistants. In Hampton Roads, they make an average of $16.86 per hour in government offices, compared to $13.72 in the private sector. In our area, health workers get $29.63, on average, in government jobs and $23.80 in private industry. The one place government workers are at a disadvantage is in the top managerial ranks.
But wages don't tell the whole story — about compensation, or about why governments are in financial distress.
It's the benefits. The paid leave. The health insurance. And especially, the pensions.
The BLS estimates that nationally, private industry pays $8.03 per hour in benefits while state and local governments pay $13.65 per hour. Add together pay and benefits on that national scale, and government work earns a 45 percent premium over the private sector.
That helps explain the squeeze, as governments try to balance the promises they have made to workers against taxpayers' ability and willingness to provide the money to honor those promises.
http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-ed_compensation_edit_0401apr01,0,1796222.story