I’ve gotten into a bit of a disagreement with my boss over the government shutdown and associated events.
He asserts that a federal employee is better compensated than someone in the private sector (all else being equal - equal level of education, same basic job duties, same number of years of seniority, etc.). I disagreed, but (in the interest of fighting ignorance), decided to look for myself. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble finding current numbers for this sort of comparison - most the analyses I find are several years old.
What, then, are the facts, and where can the data that demonstrates them be found?
I know that my Bro, who worked with the IRS for 20 years had figures which showed he was underpaid by 20-30% compared to the private sector. Benefits were decent but many private firms had better. Mind you, this was professional white collar work.
It’s very hard to compare, since this is a much argued field. The GOP will compare two workers in a field where the Government worker gets paid more, the Dem will do the opposite.
The CBO shows this:
where it’s about even, but lower end positions do better and upper end with higher education do not as well.
Overall, it appears that once you compare total compensation, which includes benefits and job security, they pay about the same or government does better. A govt worker often gives up some pay for the added job security, but gets back better benefits.
There is no declarative, simple answer. We’ve done this many times here with various sides pulling out their own “facts” and claiming their view is accurate.
But if you want to start, start with the OPM.gov web site, followed by usajobs.gov. From the OPM site find the basic facts about pay scales, benefits and job descriptions of federal employment. Next visit the USAjobs site and look for a position that is common in the private sector. Compare that job in your location with what you know exists with a similar (same?) private job in your area. Go from there.
I can tell you when I compare my federal position and duties with what exists in the private sector in a roughly equitable manner (some of what I do has no private sector equivalence) I’m due for a 217 percent pay raise. Considering I’ve had no COLA adjustments in three years, add another 18-20 percent to that number.
As **DrDeth **says, the pure salary comparison depends on the position. Some are better, most are worse.
Everything else is subjective. There is no objective measure of how much job security is worth. It’s worth more to some people and less to others. Ditto many other benefits.
Speaking for my profession (attorney), federal jobs tend to be paid much worse than equivalent private sector jobs. But they are still extremely competitive, which suggests there are benefits there other than the salary. They might be as intangible as a desire to do good, or do interesting work. But there’s no particular reason to call those things less important than overall salary, much less something like job security.
In the end, federal jobs are part of the same labor market as private jobs. Employees choose to work them because they are the best option for the employees. So what we should expect to find is that if you tally up all the tangible and intangible benefits to a particular person for a particular federal job they chose, it will be worth more to them than whatever private sector jobs were available to them.
Oh, that’s no secret. Working five years with the feds looks fantastic on your resume in many legal fields and you can command a much higher starting salary. So many lawyers come in for those 5 years. Some never leave, of course.
My educated guess from years in teh work force- like the USA, in Canada places where the workforce is unionized and wages are relatively known, even the non-union clerical staff tended to be paid better. It’s hard to justify paying your secretary $20,000 a year if the high-school dropout driving your forklift gets $45,000. In the civil service, ther’s the added bonus that the secretary is also covered by the union.
OTOH, professional and technical jobs, the small less bureaucratic companies have a lot more flexibility. I recall us losing a fellow tech in a fortune 500 company to a company across the street where he got a 30% raise immediately. The boss had asked to get him a 10% raise and they said “no, our policy does not allow that high a raise.” When he quit, they said “why don’t we offer him that 10% to stay?” The boss asked if they could match the 30% and the reply from HR was “no, we don’t do that.” They had a list of job positions in the department, and the pay brackets applicable to each, and a maximum raise rate - totally irrelevant to what was hapeening in the computer field at the time.
I suspect this the situation with USA (and Canadian) civil servants. If you have an oversupplied less technical job, you will be paid well thanks to the unions. If you have a useful technical skill, your pay will reflect neither the demand for your skill, nor the quality and level of your skill.
What’s generally asserted about federal workers is the following: On average, federal workers are somewhat less well paid (for equivalent jobs) than private workers. However, it differs somewhat according to the level of the job. For the lowest paid employees, the government workers are paid somewhat more. For the highest paid employees, the private workers are paid much more. In other words, in government the difference between the highest and lowest paid employees is quite a bit less, on average, than in most private companies. The fringe benefits (things like the number of days of vacation and sick leave) tend to be better in the federal government.
And that fits my generalization. A partner at a large law firm could easily make three or four times what the Attorney General of the U.S. makes. This is a clear case where a high-paid employee in a private firm makes much more than a high-paid employee in the federal government.
Should this be cast into the past tense? In future, reduced job security may be a reason government needs to increase pay. (Of course, needlessly increasing government costs is an objective of the beast-starvers who cause shutdowns.)
I think it’s difficult to find comparable job titles/positions because there are positions that only exist in one or the other. No data/cite, but it seems to me that in comparable positions, salaries might be higher in private. Though I think government benefits might give an edge in total compensation in many cases.
That said, there are also many people aspiring to “government jobs” because the compensation is appealing, and in their circumstances the pay IS much more than they would find in any private employment. I know a few people without college and without any specific skills, other than the ones they obtained in specific government jobs. If they didn’t have those jobs they would be waiting tables or perhaps assistant managing some retail place for half the pay. These people are not lawyers or scientists and perform jobs that do not exist in the private sector and/or do not exist at all without being heavily funded by the federal government.
A CEO can make 100 times what the president makes, for a lot less hassle and criticism no matter how bad the job he does; and then leave with a much much nicer retirement package.
OTOH, as an ex-president or ex-VP, if you have some brains like Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the real Bush, Clinton, and Obama, you can write your own ticket after that; Nixon IIRC went from VP (and failed CA run) to a stint with a Wall Stret legal firm for a huge salary. they just wanted his name on the letterhead.
Much as we like to criticize politicians, people take on President or Attorney general for reasons other than money, and generally are already comfortably well off by the time they get the position.
Another thing said of government jobs is that it’s really difficult to fire an employee. This “fact” usually accompanies the “fact” that they make 30% more than private employees. Is there any truth to it? I seem to hear about them getting fired all the time and assume it compares to private union jobs where it’s a little harder to fire people than non union jobs, but what’s the SD?
Once you are a Civil Service employee with tenure, they have to fire you ‘with cause’ or document the shit out of it to fire you. In some States, employers can fire you because “it’s Tuesday”, but others require more.
It’s about the same as any Union job, then. They can do it if they need to or they want to badly enough, but not on a whim.
I agree with what was said above – In general, the lower positions have higher compensation in government. As you go up, the government positions are compensated less and less than private counterparts. Given the duties and responsibilities for the upper levels of management, or specialized positions like physicians, lawyers, scientists, engineers, etc., they often earn significantly less than they could command outside.
You can browse all the positions (though titles aren’t really enough to describe what someone does) here: http://governmentsalarydata.com
I suspect that people aren’t fired for cause any more or less in government jobs than in private ones. The reason that people lose their jobs more in private industry than in government has to do with the different rate at which the two sorts of employers get rid of employees because of downsizing. In present American society, reducing the number of employees in a division of a private company, getting rid of all employees in a division, or even folding the company and firing everyone are reasonably common events. Similar things don’t happen nearly as often in the government. They happen occasionally, where a department is downsized or eliminated, but less than in private companies.
After all, that’s a significant difference between how government and private industry work. For instance, consider the building of a plane, tank, ship, or gun for the Defense Department. There will be a small number of people in the Defense Department whose permanent job is to oversee contracts for such things. When they need new ones built, they have private companies bid on a contract. When the contract starts, often many people are newly hired by the private company to work on it. When the contract finishes, many people are often let go by the private company. The people in the government who oversee contracts tend to be permanently hired though. The amount of work on contracts usually remains the same over time even though the contracts differ. The government overseers of contracts expect to spend their careers working on the overseeing of many contracts with many companies.
When I worked for the VA, it was a government requirement that they survey the “civilian” pay for the area, and they paid a starting wage equal to the average of the civilian starting wage for new hires.
But that pay grade generally increased pretty rapidly compared to the “outside.” My pay increased by 42% in three years.
If you’re asking if lawyers who work longer hours usually make more money, in one sense that’s not only wrong but exactly the reverse of the truth. At a big law firm, a new hire trying to eventually become a partner will have to work extremely long hours. He will make reasonably good money but nothing great. Twenty or thirty years later, if he has made partner, his hours will not be nearly as long and he will be making much more money.