[kscaldef]

This "study" is useless without comparing people working similar jobs. Federal civil servants are typically white-collar, well-educated, highly-specialized professionals. The average private sector employee is not.

The overall impression I get from friends and family members in the DC area is this: there's a strong appeal to the stability and pension plans available from working for the federal govt (although for young workers, the pension plans aren't nearly as good). However, once you're fully vested in the pension plans, almost everyone switches to private industry because the salaries are higher. (Frequently, this actually means doing exactly the same work, but as a govt contracter through a private company rather than a direct hire.)

[CWuestefeld]

That's not completely true. Consider the difference in benefit rate. For private-sector, the benefits are about 20% of the salary. For federal employees, the benefits are about 50% of the salary.

Now, since large components of benefits (notably healthcare) are essentially fixed, independent of salary, then if private-sector jobs tend to be of a different class that are lower paid, then that fixed portion of benefit ought to make the benefit rate be higher for those private jobs.

But just the opposite is shown in the data. Not only do pub sec jobs get paid more, but they get a higher rate of benefits on that pay.

I can't conceive of any explanation for this difference that could be in any way equitable. All I can see is that pub sec workers get an obscene amounts of benefits relative to what I and my colleagues get -- yet the ones paying for that are, in fact, me and my colleagues.

[kscaldef]

You realize that lots of people don't get any healthcare benefits at all, right? Or paid vacation? Or company pension plan / 401k?

Is that equitable? No. But the problem is more on the side of private sector jobs providing no benefits rather than govt jobs providing too much.

[anamax]

> Is that equitable? No. But the problem is more on the side of private sector jobs providing no benefits rather than govt jobs providing too much.

Those private sector jobs are paying for the public sector benefits.... If their beneifts are inadequate, why should they be paying for someone else's better benefits?

If you think that you can run a private sector biz and provide more benefits than SOP, go for it. Your employees will have it better and you'll have better employees, which will let you crush the competition, which you clearly think is, at the very least, wrong.

That's pretty close to a moral imperative so ....

[kscaldef]

That argument doesn't hold water.

a) The people with jobs without benefits are paying minuscule taxes, so it's wrong to say they are paying for the benefits of public sector employees in that sense.

b) Every time they buy something from a company that does provide benefits to some or all of its employees, those people are "paying" for someone else's benefits. But no one seems to complain about that.

This whole thing is an apples & oranges comparison. Right now, there's a class of jobs that gets benefits and a class of jobs that doesn't. Federal government jobs are overwhelmingly in the first category. Comparing them to the overall population of private sector jobs is silly.

[anamax]

> a) The people with jobs without benefits are paying minuscule taxes, so it's wrong to say they are paying for the benefits of public sector employees in that sense.

They're paying sales and gas taxes. They're paying property and utility taxes (either directly or through rent). They're paying garbage collection fees. They're paying for stamps. They're paying for licenses. And so on.

Poor people pay a lot of money that ends up in govt workers pockets. And they can't pick a different provider.

[CWuestefeld]

The people with jobs without benefits are paying minuscule taxes, so it's wrong to say they are paying for the benefits of public sector employees

I pay truly enormous taxes. While I enjoy a modicum of 401(k) benefit, it's several orders of magnitude less than the pension benefits of those being paid through my taxes.

those people are "paying" for someone else's benefits. But no one seems to complain about that.

Of course they do. Have you witnessed the number of people going to shop in WalMart to get low prices on overseas-made goods, rather than pay top dollar? What do you think is telling us?