The State Employees International Union (SEIU) called it “a smear campaign” and “a constant refrain in the Republican handbook.”
At Unshackle Upstate, we prefer to call it fiscal responsibility, the duty to analyze a significant segment of taxpayer-funded state spending to determine if changes might be in order.
We’re both talking about the debate over public sector compensation, a discussion that’s taken on new life in the state’s current budget crisis.
In a blog posting this week on at SEIU.org, the union – which has strong membership among New York state Employees – cited a new report by the National Institute for Retirement Security that it said succeeded in “Debunking the Myth of the Wealthy State Worker.”
SEIU said that according to this report – a national analysis by two economists – state and local public sector employees are paid 11 to 12 percent less than their private sector counterparts.
Might sound like a reasonable argument, but it misses two key points that basically render it irrelevant to New York’s situation.
For starters, if you look at just New York data, you get a very different result. Unshackle Upstate own report, New York’s Double Standard, found that across Upstate, salaries for state and local government employees were 10 percent higher than the private-sector average.
In fact, Alaska is the only state that pays its government employees higher wages and salaries than New York. And the salaries and wages of New York’s government workers are 44 percent higher than the average of the other 49 states.
There are a lot of other statistics I could cite, but if you want more, you can read the report itself.
Truth is, there’s only one point that I really need to make: New York’s public employees deserve the fairest compensation we can afford. And right now, New York can’t afford this.
When unions and others rail about the high salaries paid to executives of private companies, they miss the point. Those salaries are paid out of the proceeds of the company, not by taxpayers! If a company doesn’t make money, it can’t pay its workers.
Which brings me to my final point – my disappointment – make that angry frustration – over the unwillingness of union leadership to even discuss wage and benefit concessions that could help New York through this crisis.
Public employee unions in Ohio, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon and Connecticut have each accepted pay and benefit reductions to help their governments weather the results of the worst economic downturn in 80 years.
But the leadership of New York’s unions? They’d rather sacrifice jobs of their membership than agree to any cuts. And because of New York’s Taylor and Triborough laws, they don’t have to. We’re the only state in the union to have such “wage and benefit guarantees” on the books. Kind of makes you wonder. Then it makes you mad.
Smear campaign? I think not. Just the facts.
There are 2 Comments to "Unions and the Great Pay Debate"
Just curious, you stated “salaries for state and local government employees were 10 percent higher than the private-sector average”, does this “average” include all positions with all companies? I am generally anti-union, but would be curious to know if it is a true apples to apples comparison. For instance, (and I don’t have real data to support my claim), I would bet that the average salary for the faculty and staff at Syracuse University (private) would be MUCH higher than SUNY Potsdam. What about those that work for companies like Barrett Paving (private although they are unionized) versus local DOT?
Again, not saying you are wrong, but we need to compare apples to apples, there is no public sector job that is the equivalent to Wal-Mart cashier.
Mr. Gaylord: Our analysis looked at aggregate wage data. We did not do comparisons of positions in one sector to those in another, because there’s no private sector comparable for a police officer, firefighter, etc. We used the state Department of Labor’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, and compared the all-in private sector average salary to the all-in average salary for JUST the state/local workforce in NYS. (As an aside, the private sector numbers DO contain some unionized shops — a manufacturing plant, for example. Just because they’re union doesn’t make them any less private sector.)
You may want to look at a similar study done by the Empire Center in 2006 (http://www.empirecenter.org/pb/2006/09/government_work.cfm) esp. under Table 2 and Figure 2), since they also include a “comparison of collars” that looks at hourly wages in public vs private white/blue collar jobs. That’s about as close a direct comparison as can be done, while avoiding the comparability problem that presents itself when you’re talking about police, fire, etc.