Tuesday, December 31, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: The facts about public pay

On average, government workers do fine

The debate over taxes and spending will dominate next year's session of the Legislature. No surprise there. But it seems evident that a major component of the state budget will remain completely beyond public scrutiny: government personnel costs.

A survey released Friday by state Department of Personnel reported that the average state worker received $42,718 in salary this year. While those figures are lower than the average pay of employees who work for Clark County and other local agencies, the state figures still represent a 14 percent increase in compensation above the average reported in 2000, when the survey was last taken. Over that period, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of living has risen a mere 9 percent.

The results of this survey also speak volumes about the growing gap in compensation between those who are paid by the government and those who toil for private employers ... with workers in the productive, private economy coming out on the short end of the stick. Private sector employees on average earned $32,199 in 2001 -- 24.6 percent less than the average salary paid to state government workers.

Of course, you could never learn that information from the state's survey, which stated -- ludicrously -- that Nevada's public employees actually earned less than the state average, including private sector workers. The only way to make that suspect claim was to torture the data by picking and choosing salaries paid by six of the largest companies in Nevada (including a military contractor and a mining concern), ignoring thousands of other wage earners.

The financial picture for Nevada's state workers is even rosier when compared with their counterparts elsewhere. Nevada average state salaries are 29 percent higher than those in Arizona; 19 percent above those in Idaho; and 8 percent more generous than those in Oregon. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that Nevada's government employees rank eighth in pay nationwide, while its private sector workers are earning the 25th-highest wages. Meantime, the gap between public- and private-sector pay here is second only to that in Rhode Island.

And these calculations include only salaries, leaving out the abundant benefits package awarded to public employees. Again, the $18,781 in leave, health insurance and retirement benefits given Silver State workers ranks well compared with other state workers in the region.

But as state policy-makers scramble to close a budget gap potentially reaching hundreds of millions of dollars, the magnitude of public employees' pay and benefits will not be on the table -- remember that roughly half the members of the Legislature (or their spouses) are themselves government workers. In fact, the State of Nevada Employees Association, citing a gap between workers in state and local governments, has announced it will ask the Legislature for a more than an 8 percent pay hike for government workers over the next two years.

Whatever the fate of the pay raise, any complaints by public employees about their meager levels of compensation should be viewed by the state's taxpayers -- who foot the bills -- as utter nonsense.