[1] I’m willing to entertain the idea our economic system as a whole undercompensates secretaries and overcompensates executives. That’s a different issue.
Someone in my family ran a fire department in the 80s and 90s. They had no money and in this state arbitration made negotiations difficult for management to win. So they gave away pension and health concessions that were cheap then.
The number one issue with these systems are public safety pensions, because of the amount of overtime earned by these employees. Administrative staff and professionals are mostly exempt and not that big of a deal.
Nobody in 1990 would have predicted the decade of double digit cost increases that came in the 2000s and 2010s.
Pension contributions did have fiscal impacts, at least in states that require that pensions actually be funded.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2018/04/11/...
Yea, it’s insane.
Don’t believe me? Look it up - https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2017
That's happening to some extent already, but there are a lot of people who would do very well in the private sector who choose public service. For society's sake, we don't want that to be such a big sacrifice that nobody smart would do it.
"Government employees" could be running departments or administering budgets that would be director-level positions in a private corporation.
But, yeah, it seems like too much to pay $600k per year for checking that applicants correctly filled in the phone number on their 124-J forms. But I'm not sure it's always that clear cut.
There are about 421,000 police officers in the US.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enf...
If you look past Fox News sensationalist headlines, they said 146 were killed in the line of duty last year. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/06/11/americas-police-of...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work...
The most common cause of death on the job were intentional shootings, which claimed the lives of 46 officers last year. Almost as many officers died in car accidents.
Only 46 actually died from intentional shootings.
Please provide sources to counter the assertion that state/local employees often get large pensions in lieu of salary.
Or would she look for a job that pays enough to cover her cost of living today, since that's a prerequisite to reaching the pension age?
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2017/san-francisc...
I don't immediately see examples of 'pensions in lieu of salary', but those are some pretty substantial total packages, with benefits alone reaching ~$60k+/yr for many public officials.
Given the cost of living in the area, it sounds like they might actually be paying competitive salary, though it also looks like a lot of the people in that 3% are actually firefighters or sheriff's officers who pull in a lot of overtime.
"Benefits" also isn't a great category to look at, because I'd be willing to bet that if you're a software developer your benefits package is pretty expensive too and you just don't realize it. Going by their definition of "benefits", and looking up some of my own records, it looks like $60k is not that hard to hit. Insurance and 401(k) matching (or pension contributions, for a government employee) are more expensive than you probably think they are.
I know that's not true of teachers in other states; Oklahoma teachers look like they're getting shafted.
But in Illinois, where we have a public pension crisis, I don't have trouble coming up with evidence that public sector employees did not make cash comp sacrifices for their defined-benefit pensions.
Her degree is at a higher level, she's a civil engineer and with a professional license on top; as a tech person,I make about 50% more.
If she went to a private company, that actually paid women the same as men, we would make almost the same. Her choice was to bet on the state after having been exploited in the private sector and with no recourse.
For example, I doubt that software engineers are competively paid, when compared to industry. But that is more of a function of how ridiculously high industry pay is.
First, any senior skilled tech employee takes a big pay cut to work in government. Programmers, doctors, scientists, engineers.
Second, the bulk of the federal workforce has been squeezed down on pay over the past 15 years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2018/01/05/...
federal unions and their Democratic supporters point to data released by the Federal Salary Council. In 2016, the council, using Labor Department surveys, determined that federal employees are paid 34 percent less on average than private-sector counterparts — a finding in line with previous annual reports.
Note that Republicans argue with the above quote, of course -- we know that Republicans argue in bad faith (aka they lie) on any issue relating to their main goal - tax cuts for the rich. See (amongst many stories)
http://theweek.com/articles/766632/liar-paul-ryan
Paul Ryan cruised to national prominence on the realization that there was no longer any immediate penalty for a Republican lying constantly, about everything. (Donald Trump would later take advantage of this fact.)
If you said that there are problems with federal recruitment, retention, and removal of poor employees, that would be a largely true statement. But a large number of fed employees are underpaid.