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Regional Labor Review (Spring/Summer 2018)
Is New York’s Public Sector Workforce Overpaid? by Gregory DeFreitas
For much of the past decade, state and local governments and the people who work for them have increasingly been targets of critics challenging their costs and benefits to taxpayers. The Great Recession of 2008-09 fueled much of this criticism: many governors and mayors responded to its deep job and revenue losses with austerity policies. Police, firefighters, teachers and many others, blameless for the recession, nonetheless faced job and workhour cuts, as well as wage and hiring freezes. Once the 2010 elections brought an ultraconservative cohort of Tea Party followers to power even in once-progressive Michigan and Wisconsin, they expanded their attack on public employees. Even harsher pay and job cuts were justified by claims that their wages and benefits were excessive compared to the private sector. Those claims in turn were cited by anti-union politicians to curtail public workers’ rights to collective bargaining and to adopt so-called right-to-work laws that often defund their unions. The Janus vs. AFSCME case that reached the Supreme Court in 2018 has the potential to extend the union defunding process nationwide. New York would seem an ideal test case for the question whether public employees are overcompensated. Often viewed as a liberal bastion comfortable with a high level of government services and employment, it is also now the most unionized state in the nation – due mainly to a union membership rate in the public sector over twice the national average. In this report, I investigate a large government data set through 2017 to compare compensation levels between state and local government employees and private sector workers statewide, separately in New York City and Long Island, and nationwide. My main findings in brief are: •The typical New Yorker working in the public sector today earns higher weekly wages, at the median, than the typical private sector employee. •But this is largely explained by the fact that the typical public sector employee is older, more experienced and far more likely to have advanced educational degrees than is common in the private sector. New York’s state and local government employees are more than twice as likely as private sector New Yorkers to have an advanced degree beyond a 4-year B.A. Once we control for