Public sector workers: friend or foe?

Right wing pundits claim that city, state and federal workers are robbing us, with total compensation vastly higher than those doing comparable work in the private sector.

Leftists say these workers are our brothers, and we should unite against our common foes, the greedy bosses and financiers.

So--do public sector employees make more? I looked for nonpartisan factchecking sources, and found that it looks like they do. Not as much as many right wingers claim...but definitely more. USA Today said it averaged around 20% (once you take all the perks into account). And it should be definitely less.

That was the civil service deal from time immemorial. You exchanged less pay for more security.

But no more. One local newspaper asked local cities for lists of employee pay. They all refused, even though public employee pay is a matter of public record. How could it be otherwise? But after suing them it got the lists and publishes them regularly. Your local paper should, too.

It's not an eye-opener. More of a jaw-dropper. For example, the city manager of a nearby town with a population of 75,000 makes more than the Vice President of the United States. And the grift goes all the down to the secretaries and street sweepers. And managers' compensation is often tied to that of the employees--yet those are the ones negotiating workers' salaries. Plus compensation is often required to be determined in comparison with other cities' workers' wages, explicitly excluding comparable private sector compensation.

And as for the greedy bosses--yes, they're greedy, by and large. Only they aren't the bosses of these public employees.

We are.

That's a fundamental difference the public employee unions don't want you to think about. I'd love it if all of us had the compensation and job security of our public sector counterparts, but we don't. So they should have the compensation we do until or unless ours goes up.

And this isn't just a problem of pay equity. During the boom the public employee unions demanded more pay, and the cities etc. bought them off in part with lavish pension deals that didn't have to be funded right away. So they weren't. Or the cities stole the funding for immediate needs, just like Congress has been raiding the Social Security trust fund for decades.

But now the bill's coming due as city employees with the sweet deal start retiring. It's an unfunded mandate that's going to rob cities of their ability to repair their infrastructure. It drove one local city--Vallejo--into bankruptcy.

The public employees claim that those pensions are just reward for taking less money than if they'd been in the public sector. They say that this mandate is unfunded because city governments stole the pension fund money, moving it into the general fund. This is often true. But I've been looking at these lists of their pay, and at least around here city employees are getting more up front and later on as well.

Plus many are gaming the system. Their pensions are based on work they do in their last year or two, and many get so much overtime during that period that their pensions are inflated spectacularly.

And the public sector employee unions give those running for office--such as city councils--lists of demands the candidates must agree to, or the unions will campaign against them.

Thus my local city council has at least four members who are in the unions' pockets--they vote for the unions reliably. So it's hard for elected officials to go against the unions.

At the state level, here in California the prison guard union wields enormous power, and acts aggressively to deflect corrections budgets into their pockets and away from anything that smacks of rehabilitation. And of course they oppose legalizing marijuana and favor long mandatory sentences for everything.

So public sector unions warp public policy in favor of public employee financial interests as well directly with sweet compensation deals.

Your first action item is transparency--get your local paper(s) to publish city government compensation information. It's your money, after all. You're the boss, not the employee, in this case. As the boss you have a right to know what your employees make.

And if that compensation seems outrageous; if your city sits on a city employee pension time bomb; if your city's in debt and it's getting worse; if your infrastructure isn't being maintained...then you need to support city council candidates who are in the taxpayers' pockets, not the unions, not developers--not anybody but you.