AFGE’s Gage fires back at Romney
April 26th, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
(Darren McCollester, Getty Images)
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s comment about “unfair” federal pay and benefits has raised the hackles of the two largest federal unions. The National Treasury Employees Union slammed Romney yesterday for going after middle-class federal workers. And today, American Federation of Government Employees President John Gage let loose with an even more cutting response:
You know what’s really unfair? The specter of having a new boss who thinks so little about the work that you do that he can’t bother getting his facts straight before making the ridiculous and patently false claim that federal workers are “getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve.”
Gage flat-out rejected Romney’s allegation that feds receive drastically higher pay and benefits than private-sector employees, and cited “decades of research by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics” that shows feds consistently earn much smaller salaries.
What Gage said is true, but may not tell the whole story. The Federal Salary Council, using BLS data, last reported in November that federal pay fell even further behind private-sector pay last year, and concluded that feds now earn 26.3 percent less than their private-sector counterparts. But some federal pay experts have their doubts about the council’s methodology. (Even Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry has said the government’s pay gap numbers have a credibility problem.)
And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office came to very different conclusions earlier this year — partly by throwing health, retirement and other benefits in the mix, which the salary council does not. CBO found federal employees are compensated, on average, 16 percent higher than private-sector workers. (It’s also worth noting that Gage and other union officials heavily criticized CBO’s study when it was released.)
Tags: John Gage, Mitt Romney, pay gap
Romney: ‘Unfair’ for feds to get better pay, benefits
April 25th, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
(Darren McCollester, Getty Images)
Now that Mitt Romney has all but locked up the GOP presidential nomination, he’s turning his focus to the general election against President Obama. And if his comments last night are any indication, your pay and benefits are going to be a hot topic between now and November:
I have a very different vision for America, and of our future. [...] This America is fundamentally fair. We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses; we will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next. [emphasis added]
This isn’t the first time Romney has taken aim at federal employees. Last August, he said the government has too many feds who are paid too much, and in November he proposed cutting 10 percent of the federal workforce through attrition to save $4 billion.
National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley blasted Romney’s comments:
Every day, federal workers — from law enforcement officers to food inspectors to doctors to scientists in virtually every discipline, and many others — perform a variety of tasks vital to ordinary people throughout our country. Every federal employee knows well there is a direct connection between the efforts he or she makes, day in and day out, and the quality of life for the public they serve.
Kelley also reiterated that federal employees are in the midst of a two-year pay scale freeze that is expected to save $60 billion over a decade. Also, Congress has also passed pension cuts for new and future feds that will cost them $15 billion.
Tags: Mitt Romney, NTEU, pay gap
OPM’s John Berry skeptical of CBO study showing overpaid feds
February 2nd, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
John Berry
Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry yesterday weighed in on the Congressional Budget Office study that found federal employees are compensated 16 percent higher than private sector employees. Long story short, Berry has his doubts and wants to see more from CBO on how they derived their figures.
Berry’s primary concern is that they may not have taken the complexity of jobs into account. For example, he said:
Let’s take a job — forklift operator. You’ve got a forklift operator in the private sector, a forklift operator in the public sector. Both have a high school diploma. Private sector forklift operator is moving furniture and boxes. Public sector forklift operator is taking nuclear-tipped torpedoes and loading them into a very tight area on a multibillion-dollar nuclear submarine, where one wrong move could have very dire implications.
Would you pay both people the same? No. So it underscores the difficulty when one looks and says, high school degree here, high school degree here, why is this one getting paid more? My answer to that would be, complexity of the work has got to be considered. [...] To me, unless you look at the complexity of the job, it becomes almost irrelevant.
Berry also said that a Veterans Affairs Department nurse may be treating much more complicated war wounds than a nurse in a private-sector hospital, which would justify higher pay.
He cautioned that OPM hasn’t had a chance to sit down with CBO and take a closer look at their methodology, and said they may have accounted for his concerns. But his gut reaction is that the human capital model CBO appears to have used “is certainly not going to help us to design a pay system.”
Berry called on Congress to form the civil service reform commission that Obama called for last September in his deficit reduction plan. But there’s been no apparent action on that front.
Tags: CBO, John Berry, pay gap
CBO pay gap study draws unions’ fire, conservatives’ praise
January 31st, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
Gage
Yesterday’s Congressional Budget Office report on federal employee compensation is already renewing the debate over the federal-vs.-private sector pay gap. The report — which concluded federal employees are compensated 16 percent higher than private sector workers — prompted the conservative Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute and the libertarian Cato Institute to take victory laps.
Heritage’s Jason Richwine and James Sherk quibbled with CBO’s methodology (CBO’s findings generally tracked with Heritage’s conclusions that feds receive higher pay and benefits than the private sector, though CBO said the difference was much slimmer). But overall, they view the report as vindication and used it to swipe at Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry, federal unions, and other left-leaning organizations who criticized Heritage’s assertions. Said Richwine and Sherk:
Heritage’s prior critics, however, must now either redirect their same harsh invective at the CBO or — much better — acknowledge the validity of our conclusions.
The American Federation of Government Employees is choosing the former. In a statement released last night, AFGE National President John Gage blasted the study as “pointless,” “absurd,” “academic and irrelevant.” Gage said:
Tags: AFGE, Cato Institute, Colleen Kelley, John Gage, NTEU, Partnership for Public Service, pay gap
Tax hikes for the rich? Nah, let’s freeze federal pay again
November 30th, 2011 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
The chances of an extended pay freeze just went up even more. Politico reports today that Senate Republicans want to extend the current two-year pay freeze by one or two more years to cover the costs of a payroll tax cut.
President Obama is pushing Congress hard to renew the payroll tax cut, and Democrats want to increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for it. A bill proposed by Senate Democrats would impose a 3.25 percent tax on annual income above $1 million to cover its roughly $115 billion price tag.
But Republicans have consistently rejected any proposal that raises taxes for the rich, and the payroll tax debate is no exception. Politico said that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ken., told reporters yesterday that his conference is open to extending the payroll tax holiday, but that his party would pay for it differently.
Senate Republicans reportedly held a closed-door meeting yesterday where they coalesced around the pay freeze extension plan, along with possibly means-testing Medicare and Social Security benefits. Politico quoted an unnamed Republican senator who said that the gulf between federal and private sector pay has widened over the years — in feds’ favor — as a reason for extending the pay freeze.
The current payroll tax holiday is due to expire Dec. 31, and if it is not renewed, the average household could see taxes increase by about $1,500.
Tags: pay freeze, pay gap, payroll tax
Romney: Cut federal workforce by 10 percent
November 4th, 2011 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
(Darren McCollester, Getty Images)
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney today called for cutting the federal workforce by 10 percent as part of his plan to reduce the federal deficit.
Romney said the reduction of roughly 210,000 federal employees through attrition would save about $4 billion. Under Romney’s plan, agencies would only be able to hire one new employee for every two who leave. That’s less strict than the workforce reduction bill the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved yesterday, which would only allow one new employee for every three who leave.
Romney also called for cutting federal employee compensation to bring it in line with the private sector, which he said would save $47 billion. He said federal compensation is 30 to 40 percent higher than private-sector compensation when benefits are factored in. “This must be corrected,” he said. The federal government, on the other hand, today said that federal salaries fell further behind private-sector salaries this year, largely due to the pay freeze.
“The American people are increasingly working to support the government,” Romney said, according to the Washington Post. “It ought to be the other way around.”
Tags: Mitt Romney, pay gap, presidential campaign
Connolly and Moran blast federal workforce myths
March 18th, 2011 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
Virginia Democratic Reps. Gerry Connolly and Jim Moran have had it with their colleagues on Capitol Hill using federal employees as “a political punching bag.” Today, they sent lawmakers a letter that aims to refute what they called “myths” about the federal workforce:
- Myth: Most federal employees live in or near Washington.
Fact: 85 percent of the federal workforce does not live in this region. Texas has more federal employees than Maryland, and Alaska has more federal employees per capita than Virginia.- Myth: Federal employees earn far more than private sector employees, on average $120,000 per year.
Fact: Federal employees earn 22-24 percent less than private sector employees in comparable jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which conducts the most in-depth study of pay. The widely-cited $120,000 figure inaccurately counts future pension payments, which include employee annuity contributions, as wages.- Myth: Most federal employees work in agencies related to education, regulation or welfare.
Fact: 63 percent of federal employees work for agencies whose primary purpose is national security. The smallest executive branch departments are Education and Housing and Urban Development.- Myth: The federal government has grown larger than ever before.
Fact: The federal government is the smallest it has been in the last 60 years, relative to the U.S. population and the size of our economy. The number of federal civilian employees per 1,000 Americans has shrunk steadily from 13.2/1,000 in 1962 to 8.4/1,000 today.- Myth: It is nearly impossible to fire a federal employee.
Fact: 11,668 federal employees were fired last year.
The federal employee advocacy group Federally Employed Women released a statement lauding the lawmakers, who count thousands of federal employees among their constituents. “The misunderstanding of the federal workforce, including pay, location and size among others, has reached fever pitch and it is seriously feeding the anti-federal worker emotion on Capitol Hill as well as beyond the Beltway,” FEW representative Janet Kopenhaver said. “Hopefully this member-to-member letter will educate legislators and their staffs about how wrong these myths are in reality.”
Do their claims hold water? Largely, yes, although its worth noting that several economists and pay experts — not just at the Heritage Foundation — have questioned the thoroughness of the BLS studies Connolly and Moran cite as gospel.
As for the 11,668 firings in 2010, that works out to half a percent of the overall 2.1 million federal workforce. (You can decide for yourself if that’s too little or just right.) But earlier this week, Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry reiterated his desire to improve the government’s performance management and ratings system, which he compared to Lake Wobegone — “where everyone is above average.”
Tags: Gerry Connolly, James Moran, pay gap
Steny Hoyer: Debate over federal pay is ‘bunk’, ‘not legitimate’
March 8th, 2011 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer yesterday delivered a blunt criticism of those who say federal employees are “overpaid, overbenefited and underworked:”
That’s bunk. That is bunk. That’s not a legitimate debate.
Hoyer, speaking to representatives of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association at their conference in Arlington, said he’s “never seen such a broad antipathy directed at public employees — federal, state and local — as I see today.”
Hoyer acknowledged that there are some slackers in the federal workforce — “you’ve worked with some” — who should be weeded out. But he said federal employees and retirees need to speak up so other citizens and lawmakers understand what services they provide and how vital the bulk of feds are.
Also at the conference, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., said the government needs to produce more detailed information — broken out job-by-job — on the pay gap between federal employees and their private-sector counterparts.
Tags: Gerry Connolly, pay gap, Steny Hoyer
OPM’s Berry, NTEU’s Kelley to square off against Heritage, AEI
March 4th, 2011 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
Two wonks enter. One wonk leaves. (Photo by Chris Lawrence via Flickr, under a creative commons license)
The House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on the federal workforce just sent me the witness list for next week’s hearing on federal employees’ pay. Let’s just say this will be as close to Thunderdome as a federal pay debate can get.
In the blue corner: Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry and National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley. They stand by the government’s calculations that federal employees earn an average of 24 percent less than their private sector counterparts.
And in the red corner: James Sherk, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, and Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. To say they’re skeptical of the government’s pay gap estimations would be an understatement of criminal proportions.
The wild card will be Partnership for Public Service President Max Stier. The Partnership aims to encourage young people to pursue federal and other public service jobs, and has pointed out the flaws in studies purporting to show feds are vastly overpaid. But their experts also say that the government’s methodology for determining the pay gap is highly flawed, and have called for a major overhaul of the system. (OPM pledged to start studying the matter and come up with “ironclad” pay data almost a year ago, but nothing ever came of that.)
OK, maybe the steel cage match talk is a slight exaggeration. But it will be interesting to have the two sides come face to face for the first time. For more than a year, the debate over federal pay has played out in the press and through reports issued by think tanks, and we’re no closer to resolving this issue. We’ll see if both sides continue to dig in their heels and insist their way is the right way, or if they’ll start inching toward a new, transparent way of determining the pay gap that all parties can agree to.
‘Compassionate’ talk at Heritage Foundation
September 21st, 2010 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
The Heritage Foundation today hosted a panel discussion on the public-private pay gap that didn’t really touch on a whole lot that hasn’t already been hashed out over the last several months. But it did yield this interesting exchange in response to a reporter’s question about the Obama administration’s claims that stimulus dollars saved state and local government jobs:
Chris Edwards, Cato Institute: ‘What’s wrong with layoffs of state and local government workers? … Recessions create a sort of weeding out in the private sector, where companies lay off the least efficient workers, and then they’re ready to grow again when the economy starts booming. We don’t see that healthy weeding-out effect in the government sector, unfortunately. I’ve got kids in public school in Fairfax County, and I don’t see anything wrong with, during a recession when money is tight, for schools to lay off teachers and have the teacher-pupil ratio rise a bit. What’s the big deal?’
Andrew Biggs, American Enterprise Institute: ‘If state and local workers are actually 10 percent underpaid, as these studies claim, then by laying them off you’re giving them the opportunity to get a private sector job where you can earn 10 percent more.’ [laughter]
Jason Richwine, Heritage: ‘It’s the compassionate thing to do.’
Biggs: ‘Exactly.’
Tags: Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, pay gap