We have something like a bipartisan consensus that public sector unions are a major cause of states’ budget shortfalls and that public sector workers are overpaid. The first claim, at least, seems to be lacking in evidence.
And the second is no better. This goes back to an exchange I had with Alex Sherbany a couple months ago. I suggested that one response to the “revolving door” phenomenon was to raise public sector pay. Alex pointed out that “public sector employees get paid more on average than private sector employees, for less work.” I then commented on his post, noting that the report he cited included a disclaimer that disavowed any direct comparisons between the public and private sectors. I said, “the industries just aren’t directly comparable. They do different things. You have to compare apples to apples: people in both sectors with the same levels of education and experience.”
Now, a report has come out from the Economic Policy Institute which “shows that Wisconsin public employees earn 4.8% less in total compensation per hour than comparable full-time employees in Wisconsin’s private sector.” (This apparently includes non-wage benefits, which are generous in the public sector. See also similar findings for Chris Christie’s New Jersey.)
Obviously the most important term is “comparable.” The EPI report held constant “education, experience, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and disability.” We can see why at least controlling for education is important from the fact that “59% of full-time Wisconsin public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 30% of full-time private sector workers.” As Alex said, the relevant comparison is not between high school teachers and investment bankers. It’s between, say, UW-Madison professors and Beloit College professors.
One wrinkle is job security, which is non-quantifiable yet quite valuable to workers. Public sector workers enjoy more job security than private sector workers. But just because job security is valuable to workers doesn’t mean it’s a budget-buster. States pay their workers in salaries and benefits, not in “expected pay” after accounting for the possibility of being fired. And the fact is that public workers’ salaries and benefits are not overly generous given the types of people working in the public sector and the types of jobs they are doing.
One gets the sense that this union-provided job security is really what rankles Wisconsin’s Gov. Walker and his supporters. The governor won’t accept the benefit cuts which unions are offering because he wants a bigger prize—to destroy the job security that unions provide by destroying their collective bargaining rights.
One last thing. I’m a little confused by the political aspects of this debate. Public school teachers, perhaps the most prominent and scapegoated public sector workers, seem actually to be a fairly popular group of people. Seventy-one percent of national adults in a 2010 Gallup poll said they have “trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools.” Support was a little higher still among public school parents. Do people have trust and confidence in teachers’ ability to teach, but also believe they’re overpaid drains on the public coffers? Maybe they do. And of course I’m no fan of opinion polls, especially on questions that people are unlikely to have thought much about. Yet my general sense is that Americans on the whole are pretty favorable towards teachers.
So, can anyone clarify where the political advantage of blasting teachers comes from? I guess you could say “we’re blasting teachers’ unions, not teachers,” yet the fact remains that teachers themselves love teachers’ unions and the implication of blasting teachers’ unions is that your child’s very own teachers are overpaid drains on the public coffers.
© 2024 Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved.