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I received this as an email from the Goldwater Institute
City-Funded Report on Government Pay Called into Question by Nick Dranias & Stephen Slivinski Phoenix taxpayers recently paid almost a half a million dollars for a report that looked at city-employee compensation. The report reveals that some types of workers get paid more than the market average; some get paid less. But when you include benefits, the report found that all government workers in Phoenix are vastly better off than private sector workers. These findings could have been obtained for a fraction of the cost, simply by surveying existing academic literature. Unlike the Goldwater Institute’s own research, which has revealed that public sector collective bargaining costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, there is little in the way of actual “news” in the new Phoenix report. In fact, the report missed an opportunity to uncover the real differences in pay and benefits between government and private workers in the City of Phoenix. The Phoenix report omits any comparison of the hourly compensation of government versus private sector workers. It’s a big omission, particularly since the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported state and local government workers receive average hourly compensation that is 44 percent higher than private sector workers. This failure to compare hourly compensation, despite abundant resources to do so, demonstrates that the city-funded report doesn’t present an accurate picture of the local differences in compensation between government and private sector workers. It also calls into question whether this omission was inadvertent or by design -- such an analysis may have revealed that government employees receive dramatically more hourly compensation than private sector workers. Nick Dranias holds the Clarence J. and Katherine P. Duncan Chair for Constitutional Government and is director of the Joseph and Dorothy Donnelly Moller Center for Constitutional Government at the Goldwater Institute. Stephen Slivinski is a Senior Economist with the Goldwater Institute |