Perhaps Magellan was referring to the fact that:
Total employer compensation cost in 2011 averaged $40.76 per hour for state and local workers; for private industry workers it was $28.24 per hour. The disparities are also big for federal workers. A janitor working for Uncle Sam makes $30,110 a year, while his or her private-sector peer makes $24,188. Federal graphic designers, “recreation workers,” and even P.R. flacks all make between 50 percent and 100 percent more than their private-sector colleagues.
Then there’s the very generous pensions for public workers:
These huge pension increases have eaten away at public finances, most spectacularly in California, where a bipartisan bill that passed virtually without debate unleashed the odious “3 percent at 50” retirement plan in 1999. Under this plan, at age 50 many categories of public employees are eligible for 3 percent of their final year’s pay multiplied by the number of years they’ve worked. So if a police officer starts working at age 20, he can retire at 50 with 90 percent of his final salary until he dies, and then his spouse receives that money for the rest of her life. Even during the economic crisis, “3 percent at 50” and the forces behind it have only become more entrenched.
In the midst of California’s 2008–09 fiscal meltdown, with the impact of deluxe public pensions making daily headlines, the city of Fullerton nevertheless sought to retroactively increase the defined-benefit retirement plan for its city employees by a jaw-dropping 25 percent. What’s more, the Fullerton City Council negotiated the increase in closed session, outside public view. Under California’s open meetings law, known as the Brown Act, even legitimate closed-session items such as contract negotiations are supposed to be advertised so that the public has a clear idea of what’s being discussed. But the Fullerton agenda for that night only vaguely referred to labor negotiations.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that many public employee shenanigans either are illegal or should be:
A large percentage of public safety officials —more than two-thirds of management-level officials at the California Highway Patrol, for instance—come down with something widely known as “Chief’s Disease” about a year before their scheduled retirement. “High-ranking [CHP] officers, nearing the end of their careers, routinely pursued disability claims that awarded them workers’ comp settlements,” John Hill and Dorothy Korber of the Sacramento Bee reported in 2004. “That, in turn, led in many cases to disability retirements. As they collected their disability pensions, some of these former CHP chiefs embarked on rigorous second careers—one as assistant sheriff of Yolo County, for example, another as the security director for San Francisco International Airport.”
When Mike Clesceri was mayor of Fullerton (a part-time position filled by a city council member), he also worked as an investigator for the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. As his retirement approached, Clesceri claimed to have an extreme case of acid reflux, which would help him net a tax-free pension of $58,000 a year, plus cost-of-living increases. Even while retired with that alleged disability, Clesceri pursued a local police chief’s job, retained his mayorship, and ran a tough re-election campaign. He even had the time to have his brother-in-law, an attorney, send threatening letters to members of the community who commented on the absurdity of his disability pension. As Clesceri explained in a newspaper column, the disability only applied to his job at the D.A.’s office.