THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PRIVATE-SECTOR & GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES

…The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a  neutral organization

Too bad our president doesn’t understand the difference.

If you are regular follower of my blog, you have probably noticed that I refer to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) quite frequently.  I do this because they are usually the best non-partisan source for good government information.

Recently, I went looking for information on the comparison of federal employee pay against the private-sector pay.  In that task, I improperly assumed that as with the CBO, the comparison by the Labor Department would also take in consideration the worker’s benefits in the comparison.   Since that subject would be very important as what each employ would be taking home in their individual pay checks.

It came as a real surprise to me that for some reason, the law that requires the annual Labor Department pay comparison report only allows for the study of the salaries alone, not a worker’s total compensation.

Therefore, the latest Federal Salary Council report, based on Labor Department data, again concluded that federal employees are behind in pay by about a 30+% on average.

But the CBO, using a different method, concluded last year that salaries overall are about equal.

That study did include benefits and concluded that federal employees are equal to private-sector employees overall, mainly because of their retirement and health-care benefits.

By combining pay and benefits, it said that federal employees with the least education are ahead of similar private-sector employees in compensation by 53%.  However, those federal workers with the most education, compared to outsiders, their compensation is behind private-sector employees by 18%.  That just shows that the more educated federal workers are definitely paid less than those same employees in the private sector.  Even with their excellent federal retirement and health-care coverage, well-educated federal workers pay is behind private-sector employees.  But when you compare everyone in both groups, they as federal vs private-sector groups overall are equal.

But it is important to understand that the CBO cautioned that a comparison of benefits is “much more uncertain” than the Labor Department’s comparison of wages.  That is largely because of the difficulty of projecting the future value of retirement benefits.

And of course, It did not attempt to put a value on other factors such as that of “job security”.

My point of all this is to show that there are pros and cons of both the government jobs and the private sector jobs and that both sectors are very different in how they do business.

As an example, today we are seeing and hearing how our president and his cabinet keep screwing up.  Much of these problems are because these former private-sector workers don’t understand that as government employees, the rules, compensation and “the way business is done” is different from their previous private-sector roles.

My prediction is that due to this ignorance of how the US government works, the president’s cabinet will continue to have high-speed revolving doors.

Hopefully, this revolving door will eventually include the president himself.

Copyright G.Ater  2018