I am reading outrageous claims about the salaries federal employees make. I retired from the federal government and I never knew anyone who came close to some of the numbers I’ve been seeing. The majority of employees are median earners, around a GS-5 or GS-7. You have to be a college graduate to start as a GS-5 or work your way up through the grades. I left as a GS-12 after many years. We never got bonuses because my boss just didn’t believe in them. My son has gotten two bonuses but then again he works weekends and late nights with no additional pay in the medical field. I know when people are scared and have lost their jobs and benefits they want to attack someone or something to make it better. People expect their social security, their mail to be delivered, and all the agencies to respond quickly if there is some problem, like FDIC when the banks were failing. I myself don’t like to deal with bureaucratic morons but I think you will find most government employees do their jobs well and serve the public for an average salary of much less than you think. 2011-GS Annual Rates by Grade and Step
I have no idea what a GS 5 or GS 7 are, but in every country Civil servants/ public servants/ federal employees are easy targets. They are seen as bludgers.
It is not correct, but with an easy target that won’t get sympathy, why would the press get it right?
I totally agree. Federal employees are just a convenient scapegoat because of the outliers on the high end and Republicans’ shitty math skills. Personally I am vastly underpaid; in the private sector I would actually be making about 20% more than I do currently, benefits included.
Here’s a good article about the subject from FactCheck.
You can complain that the U.S. government does not operate efficiently, that it’s slow, hamstrung by inertia and politics, and doesn’t serve the taxpayers in the best way it can, but it’s dumb to complain that the employees are overpaid. When a person decides to take a federal job, they trade in the hope of making more money for something else - job security.
Now, you can argue that federal employees have too much job security, and it’s too hard to get rid of them if they don’t do their jobs, or if their jobs are made obsolete by new technology.
But if you got rid of all the protections that make federal jobs so secure, you’d definitely have to pay people a lot more money to do them. It just wouldn’t be worth it otherwise, and nobody would work for the government.
Why do people think federal employees are overpaid?
Because undermining confidence in the government benefits the wealthy elites.
Here is the general pay scale, which doesn’t include law enforcement, medical, executive service, etc. It also doesn’t reflect location pay or allowances such as COLA. For more tables, click here. People who claim that government employees are overpaid have simply not bothered to check the facts. Also, many jobs in government don’t really have a counterpart in civilian life.
I worked summers in college for the government and also worked temporarily for the Census in 2010 and felt each time that there were either too many people working or pretending to work on something at one time. I felt like nearly half of the workers at any given time should not have been there. Private employers don’t waste money like that. When the workload drops off, a private employer lays off or cuts hours. No matter what the workload is, the government allows its employees to milk the system for nothing. I’ve seen it firsthand. It happens all too often.
Remember the standard of comparison isn’t what people *ought *to be paid, but rather what the private sector pays.
In a world where most private sector mid- and low-level workers have seen pay cuts, benefits cuts (or increases in out-of-pocket benefits costs), and have nil job security, it’s easy to beleive that government workers have it better. And in some cases it’s actually true. Who’s better off, the cash register operator at the Post Office or some other fee collecting station, versus the one at KMart?
But the real answer is simply what Goebbels famously said. Paraphrasing: “Keep repeating a big enough lie and pretty soon everybody believes it’s the truth.”
As **The Hamster King **points out, it’s pretty clear who benefits when that particular lie becomes the truth.
You think they’re over paid and have too much job security, if you’ve ever had to deal with them directly. They always tell you to call a phone number (which you do). Then you get transfered (hopefully to a department that is still there). After spending any where from 30 minutes to an hour on the phone, you get back to the original person. Then, you see that person was supposed to help you but they find some reason not to (because they’re lazy). You have to go down to the building anyway, despite websites and phone services telling you differently. When wasting my time and possibly having to take a day off pays your salary, I think you’rfe useless and overpaid.
I have a, um, friend who is a government contractor, and works side-by-side with government employees 40 hours a week.
According to (um) him, the problem is not pay. The problem is that many government workers are in cushy jobs that don’t require them to do much. There’s no competition, hence little incentive to be productive.
And, of course, this sort of thing never happens when you are dealing with large commercially run organizations.:rolleyes:
I haven’t actually dealt with federal pay scales since the 80’s, but as I remember it back then the low-level federal workers were paid well relative to the private sector, but as you went up the management tree federal pay got worse and worse compared to similar jobs in the private sector - to the point that the folks high up weren’t paid nearly as well as their private sector counterparts.
(I remember reading an article about the Philadelphia airport and its difficulties finding a new general manager - and discovering that I, as a computer programmer (an exceptionally good one IMHO , but not in a management position at all) made more money than the person who would be responsible for the entire Philadelphia airport!)
Exactly. One of my aunts just retired from the government and then started working for them again doing contract work and she told me flat out that “they should train young people to do this” at a fraction of the cost. The government wastes money like no private corporation or small business owner would! Too many government workers do not earn their salaries. They show up and collect their checks.
There is no longer the job security for feds there once was. Not only extra-ordinary crap like the government shudown drama of a few months ago and the debt ceiling crisis now, but also routine reductions in force, cut backs, restructurings, etc. The benefits are generally good, but not universally good - the US federal government has crummy short-term disability benefits. People need to ask for “donations” of leave time when they are seriously ill, have used up their own time off, but don’t have LTD yet.
I’m a contractor and I’m confident I cost more than a guvvy doing the same job. OTOH, I was hired quickly and can be fired quickly and easily.
We in .gov/.mil feel frustration with the bureacracy also - we’re surrounded by it! Some of it comes from policies created high in the adminisphere. Some of it comes from attempts to ensure full accountability - imagine how many grocery clerks you’d need if every single been needed to be counted at the whim of some Cabinet Secretary or Congresscritter. Some of the bureaucracy comes from trying to prevent repeats of past mistakes. I think we’ve got more levels of review for the release of routine software patches at my agency than NASA had for manned rocket launches.
IME the goverment folks vary from good to excellent. They are doing their best in a sluggish bureacratic environment with moderate pay, decent but not top-line benefits, and against the spite of a large part of society. The government employees I’ve worked with are driven by a genuine desire to serve their country. I used to work on a Defense Logistics Agency contract. The people there are focused on serving their customers - the Warfighters - more so han most commercial organizations. I’m looking at YOU, telcos and cable cos!
It is true many are lazy and don’t produce much. (At least according to my friend.) You don’t see this as nearly as much in private or commercial organization where profits are at stake. At the same time, though, I’m not sure anything can be done to correct the situation. How do you incentivize workers when there is no competitive pressure?
Yes they do, especially large corporations. This is the corollary myth to the one that federal employees are necessarily overpaid.
Not sure they get paid too much. It does seem almost impossible for them to be fired.
Still, working in shipping for a few years, U.S. Postal workers were the biggest bunch of whiners that I ever met. They almost all seemed to hate their job.
Cite?
I’ve worked with both. People are people. There’s no magic wand that automatically turns someone into a better employee just because they work in the private sector.
I think people buy into the Republican demonization of the government far too easily. Republicans want to defund and remove the authority of the government to allow businesses to operate without supervision or accountability.
It’s interesting that those who demonize the government are the same people who want you to vote them back into office. In my experience, many who criticize government employees have an underlying agenda or are generalizing from limited experience. I’ve seen my share of lazy assholes and unnecessary positions in both the private and public sectors and can say without equivocation that an asshole is an asshole no matter where he works. It also seems that those who are loudest in their condemnation of government are those with their hands out for some sort of payment.
Nope. Nobody ever complains about shitty customer service in the private sector. Nobody ever posts rants here about their lazy, incompetent co-workers who should be fired but for some reason never are. Nobody ever encounters situations with private companies in which they are re-routed, over and over and over, to different departments and end up wasting hours trying to get a problem solved.
People who believe that private companies are the paragon of efficiency and public departments all suck Satan’s inflamed left buttock amuse me. Don’t we have regular mini-rants and regular rants by people pissed off at Comcast, Lowe’s, Home Depot, their local grocery store, etc.? Do people not pay attention to those?