The Pay Gap Is Growing

As we celebrate the day by which all of us will have handed over our "Fair Share" to the Federal, State, and Local governments in an increasingly tough economy (and the day of the Tea Parties of course), we have yet one more thing to inflame our passions (as if the budget, the bailouts, and the tax code were not enough). It is a disparity that continues to grow in this country. 

No I am not talking about the disparity in the amount of taxes paid between the rich and poor (I'm an evil Conservative after all, and we don't talk about things like that). In fact it's a growing disparity in the in the compensation that people receive for their labors. This is not however a discussion of the disparity in the packages of CEO's and blue collar workers or the disparity between the pay given to male and female employees for the same work (again I am a Conservative, so you obviously won't hear about such things from me). Instead, it is a discussion of the growing disparity in pay between workers in the public and private sector. 

According to an article in USA Today from 4/10/09 entitled Public, private pay gap grows, while the wage gap between the public and private sectors has remained pretty much the same (in the public sector's favor of course) the growth in salary benefits has led to a steadily increasing divergence between the two. Last year in fact, government benefits rose at a rate three times more than those in the private sector, $.69 vs $.23; with totals salary packages averaging $27.35 in the private sector and $39.25 in the public sector.  

In fact, according to the numbers in just one area of such packages from the the Bureau of Labor Statistics data that USA Today used, government workers receive more than double the amount of money contributed to their health care than private sector workers received ($8800 vs $4100). While this seems to have had no impact on a Federal government that continues to add new employees at a rate that only Carl Sagan would have been capable of keeping up with (oh come one, everyone remembers "billions and billions"), this disparity does appear to be having some impact on other levels. 

Ohio's government workers as an example, have agreed to take unpaid furlough days in order to help return $440 million to state coffers over the next two years, a period in which the state budget is desperate to find ways to make ends meet. (Of course what remains little talked about with this agreement is that the workers will get most of this back in the third year.) On the local level, Toledo has likewise noticed this trend and while facing a $28 million budget shortfall, is looking at both the salary and benefit packages of city employees (even those with previously negotiated union contracts). 

In yet another example of emulation, they are attempting to discover if there is a way to use the state as an example to get some of the money contributing to this disparity back. Being politicians, I suspect that they are likewise deciding whether such a growing disparity in pay to city workers in an area where unemployment is currently running at about 13%, is a politically defensible position any longer. While many will be running for cover as this continues to be an ever-growing issue in an ever-growing government, legislators across the country have finally realized that there is an elephant in the room that they can no longer ignore.

"People will become angrier and angrier when they learn the difference between their pay and benefits and what we give to public employees," state Sen Chris Lauzen of Illinois was quoted as saying in the article.  

(Really!  Ya think?)