About Damned Time

[Ddrak]

Because when you combine their benefits and wages they are still better than private sector.

Not if you believe politifact. They have them at about 6% worse off than the private sector. Of course, I'd be interested to see your sources too. Politifact's linked report makes interesting reading.

So, you now have public service employees who are demonstrably paid less in cash and in cash+benefits than the private sector and yet this is somehow an indictment against PSUs? Please explain.

Dd

[Kulaf]

No, you are just attributing incorrect claims to that citation. For instance:

"They have them at about 6% worse off than the private sector."

When in fact is states (emphasis mine):

From 2000 to 2008, the wages of state employees was 6.2 percent less than for private-sector employees.

Further, it goes on to state the following about benefits:

The study, done by an actuarial firm, calculated that a state employee in Wisconsin who earns $48,000 a year would retire with an estimated monthly pension benefit of $1,712. That is $411 more than a private-sector employee who earned $70,000 a year.

There are other sorts of benefits, of course, including health care and vacation time.

It concludes with:

What’s more, Kennedy’s statement skips a key point -- one union leaders have made over the years -- that pay is lower because benefits are higher.

This is my point. The state doesn't care how much the employees are being paid. What it cares about......and what many big companies in the private sector care about......are future benefit obligations which are unsustainable and will cripple a government or business. I read a report that GM now has more people on retirement benefits than it has workers. How can any company sustain that? How could any government?

[Ddrak]

No, you are just attributing incorrect claims to that citation. For instance:

"They have them at about 6% worse off than the private sector."

When in fact is states (emphasis mine):

From 2000 to 2008, the wages of state employees was 6.2 percent less than for private-sector employees.

Seriously, go back and read it again. It states:

The difference is 7.6 percent less, the report said, if pay plus benefits are considered.

So, I put the claim a little lower than the article states. If I'd talked about pay only, I'd have mentioned it as 11% or 6%, depending on how you measured. The report you're quoting didn't talk about pay+benefits but if you assume the reports are measuring similar things, it would put it in the 1% to 3% less range. On the national scene, that report you're quoting puts public employees at 6.8% lower total compensation than private employees.

So, if pay+benefits are LESS than the private sector, your argument falls more than a little flat. Yes, they may retire with a higher pension, but the sums show the higher wages of the private sector amount to a greater net wage (ie greater expense for the companies) than the public service.

Again, please provide some evidence that the total compensation for a public sector employee is higher than private. I've now delivered TWO studies that show the opposite. Surely if PSUs are so evil you'll be able to flood me with alternative viewpoints?

Dd

[Kulaf]

No, you are just attributing incorrect claims to that citation. For instance:

"They have them at about 6% worse off than the private sector."

When in fact is states (emphasis mine):

From 2000 to 2008, the wages of state employees was 6.2 percent less than for private-sector employees.

Seriously, go back and read it again. It states:

The difference is 7.6 percent less, the report said, if pay plus benefits are considered.

So, I put the claim a little lower than the article states. If I'd talked about pay only, I'd have mentioned it as 11% or 6%, depending on how you measured. The report you're quoting didn't talk about pay+benefits but if you assume the reports are measuring similar things, it would put it in the 1% to 3% less range. On the national scene, that report you're quoting puts public employees at 6.8% lower total compensation than private employees.

So, if pay+benefits are LESS than the private sector, your argument falls more than a little flat. Yes, they may retire with a higher pension, but the sums show the higher wages of the private sector amount to a greater net wage (ie greater expense for the companies) than the public service.

Again, please provide some evidence that the total compensation for a public sector employee is higher than private. I've now delivered TWO studies that show the opposite. Surely if PSUs are so evil you'll be able to flood me with alternative viewpoints?

Dd

That is a citation from a study that was "national" in scope. The 6% figure is a WI statistic. Indicating that WI public service emplyess are paid MUCH better than the national average. Sort of bolstering my point. Regarding alternative viepoints other than your cited union paid hack job analysis.....ok:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/201 ... 1_ST_N.htm

http://laborpains.org/2011/02/22/public ... te-sector/

Note that the second citation is a direct refutation of the analysis of data in your citation.

[Ddrak]

Yes, the study was national in scope. WI state public employees are 4-5% above the national average (like I said), putting them marginally below the national private sector average. I'd hardly call that number "MUCH better" (emphasis yours), but whatever.

You have some pretty good blinkers on to call the EPI report a "union paid hack job analysis" when you link a rebuttal from laborpains.org - a group entirely dedicated to union busting. Even I'm generous and we split the difference you get a couple of percent either way. Not exactly budget-busting numbers, and certainly not what Embar was describing as a "HUGE slider" or a "massive discrepancy" now, is it?

The laborpains.org report is actually a pretty dumb response. The entire swing is predicated on two things - that teachers don't work during student vacations (flat out wrong, that's when they get most of their work done) and that government employees wouldn't find jobs in large corporations (having worked in both, the culture is virtually identical - government workers would slide across with almost no culture shock). I'd say they have to do a little better than that.

USAToday's analysis was just plain wrong - it never compared skill levels.

So, all in all, we find that public sector employees really aren't overcompensated by anything like the rhetoric on this thread and in the media tries to portray and may not be even compensated at the same level as private employees (depending on who does the measuring). You agree?

Dd

[Kulaf]

On the contrary, what the laborpains report corrects is EPI reports assumption that 100% of all public service employees would be employed at the largest business size if they joined the private sector. Anyone with an ounce of statistical analysis background....which I know you have......will agree that that assumption is totally false and I would hazzard that if we just looked at the tech people on this board we would be hard pressed to come even close to those numbers. I personally have never been employed by a company with over 1000 employees. It is a rediculous assumption by the EPI report specifically designed to manipulate their data to create the report that their largest financial backers wanted. I would suggest you go to their site and look at the reports generated by the author and the timing those reports came out on and the other reports generated by the author (If you can find any).

Secondly, it doesn't matter what teachers do during their summers, they are paid for a 9mo/year job. How they manage that is their business. If anything the EPI report should be on the receiving end of your angst because it lumps teachers in with the private sector part time workers it excludes as specified in the following quote:

When analyzing hours of work most studies exclude part-time workers, since their hours vary,
they earn considerably less than comparable full-time workers, they are more weakly attached
to the labor force, and they often lack benefit coverage.

When contacted for clarification, the EPI reports author said his report speaks for itself so they reconstructed his data and found the following as noted in notes 11 and 12:

11 We contacted Dr. Keefe to clarify his definitions on which workers were excluded and which were not, but he
just directed us to look it up in the Current Population Survey. Therefore, we’ve reconstructed his sample size to
closely match the one in his original regression—a sample size that could only be obtained by excluding part-year
full-time workers.
12 According to the Census Bureau, the collector of the income data from which this estimate is derived, “A fulltime,
year-round worker is a person who worked 35 or more hours per week (full-time) and 50 or more weeks
during the previous calendar year (year-round). For school personnel, summer vacation is counted as weeks
worked if they are scheduled to return to their job in the fall.” Many of the “excluded” teachers thus classified
themselves incorrectly to the Census survey taker.

So if anything the laborpains data is more accurate regarding inclusion of teachers as full time workers than the EPI report which excluded them as part time workers.

And neither of these reports have dealt with the intangible benefit of job security......which any dispasionate analysis of job benefits would have to ascribe a monetary value to.

[Ddrak]

On the contrary, what the laborpains report corrects is EPI reports assumption that 100% of all public service employees would be employed at the largest business size if they joined the private sector.

Except that's NOT what EPI assumes. It assumes that the government is a large business size. That essentially means that if the government privatized its entire workforce that the entirety of the work would be taken up with large businesses as the contract force, not small businesses. I find that assumption reasonable. Laborpains simply had to make up some way of discrediting the report and it's a pretty weak argument that EPI's suggesting the government jobs would just vanish or something and *different* jobs would have to be obtained.

Secondly, it doesn't matter what teachers do during their summers, they are paid for a 9mo/year job.

No matter what you or laborpains tries to assert, teaching is a full-time equivalent job. I'd be hard pressed to find a teacher that puts in less than 2000 hours per year (the US full time equivalent). Some teachers work 11 hour+ days to catch up on their grading, extra-curriculars and prep while others spread that extra over the summer. Making the mistake of thinking teaching is ONLY about contact hours is just plain insulting and ignorant. It's not an accident that, as you quoted, the Census Bureau counts teachers full time even if laborpains thinks differently to suit their purposes.

As for job security, it's telling that laborpains compares the public service with the entire private sector and not like-for-like again. Like I said - biased, and blatantly so.

I repeat: Public sector employees aren't overcompensated by anything like the rhetoric on this thread and in the media tries to portray and may not be even compensated at the same level as private employees (depending on who does the measuring).

Remember, even if you ignore the bias in the laborpains report you come up with a number of 5% on total compensation. That's the difference between a 5% sales tax and a 5.25% sales tax. Hardly bankrupting the state now, is it? May I suggest the problem isn't the compensation of the state employees but the crap the legislature makes the governor hire them to do?

Dd

[Embar Angylwrath]

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/04/17/355686 ... tract.html

If there isn't a more perfect example of why public service unions have to go, it's this.

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/04/17/355686 ... tract.html

California is coping with a staggering amount of debt and budget issues. Brown campaigned on fixing the issue. His current proposal is to increase taxes and extend some so-called temporary taxes so he won't have to make hard decisions.. Decisions like:

Increasing prison guard PTO to 8 weeks (to start, more senior guards get more PTO.) How many weeks do people that function in the real world get...2 to start? Maybe three?
Removing the cap on PTO accumulation, allowing guards to rack up enormous amounts of PTO that they can cash out when they retire or quit (at what is their prsumably highest salary of their careers)
Getting a salary increase for having an annual physical exam. You don't have to pass the exam, or be healthy. Yiou can be a 400 pound walking heeart attack, but as long as you attend the exam, you get the raise.
Pay scales set to other law enforcement departments (why negotiate pay in the first place???)
Union has a say on almost every management decision.. if they don't like, they can shut it down

The last contract was presented as having a cost of a little more than $500 million. The real cost... $2.3 BILLION!!!

Why did Brown agree to this... because the prison guard union threw $2 million at his campaign, that's why. And that's why public service unions should go. They have morphed into nothing more than funnels from your pockets into theirs.

[Ddrak]

How on earth are you blaming the unions for this? I mean, the purpose of the union is to hammer out the best contract deal they can for their members and it's the governor's responsibility to hammer out the best contract deal he can for the state. Why are you demanding the prison guard union protects the interests of anyone but the prison guards?

Seriously, the entire fault here is the governor's. No one forced him to sign that bill.

Using your argument, it's McDonald's fault that people who choose to eat their food get fat, right?

Dd

[Embar Angylwrath]

How on earth are you blaming the unions for this? I mean, the purpose of the union is to hammer out the best contract deal they can for their members and it's the governor's responsibility to hammer out the best contract deal he can for the state. Why are you demanding the prison guard union protects the interests of anyone but the prison guards?

Seriously, the entire fault here is the governor's. No one forced him to sign that bill.

Using your argument, it's McDonald's fault that people who choose to eat their food get fat, right?

Dd

If you can't see how public unions that throw huge amounts of money to beholden elected representatives, who then throw huge amounts of tax-payer money back at the union members are so damaging to state budgets... this whole thread is lost on you.

This particular union gave Brown a 2 million dollar gift. And he turned around and gave them what will likely be billions of dollars in taxpayer money... all the while decrying the amount of spending the state is making and gnashing his teeth about all the draconian cuts that will come if taxes aren't raised.

The public service unions control government to a large degree. That's why even the people who advocated for union protections in the beginning said unions weren't appropriate for government workers. They saw the potential for abuse long ago. Funny you refuse to see it now when the abuse is happening right before you so blatantly.

[Ddrak]

How is a PSU giving donations and magically getting benefits any different to large companies doing exactly the same thing? Your argument is really making no sense because it assumes the governor had no choice in the matter when in reality it was 100% his choice.

Again, how was this NOT Brown's decision?

Dd

[Embar Angylwrath]

How is a PSU giving donations and magically getting benefits any different to large companies doing exactly the same thing? Your argument is really making no sense because it assumes the governor had no choice in the matter when in reality it was 100% his choice.

Again, how was this NOT Brown's decision?

Dd

It's a decision in much the same way as quid pro quos are decicions. Are you advocating for a system that allows for the funneling of tax dollars in sweetheart deals? And for the record, I've been against this type of crap no matter if the organization is a PSU or some private interest.

[Ddrak]

I'm actually advocating a system where quid pro quo doesn't exist and I place the blame primarily on the politicians if that's what has happened here, much as I feel much more negatively towards a cop accepting a bribe than the one offering the bribe. In this particular case, I don't see that the concept of PSUs is the issue at all - any entity can throw money at governors to get sweetheart deals at taxpayer's expense.

On the whole, I think a significant problem in US politics (and other nations too) is the sheer volume of money needed to attain any significant office and the resultant implied debts you incur in accepting that money.

Dd

[Harlowe]

On the whole, I think a significant problem in US politics (and other nations too) is the sheer volume of money needed to attain any significant office and the resultant implied debts you incur in accepting that money.

Dd

Nailed it.