I am not sure as the entire media narrative behind this story, but there has been a small brouhaha over an increase in the number of federal employees who earn high end salaries, ostensibly under Obama compared to Bush. Of course the Republicans & Friends are trying to make partisan hay out of this, as part of the usual bash government, bash unions, bash workers, bash Democrats and Obama.
Waldman at the American Prospect has a pretty good takedown with regard to scapegoating Federal employees.
Waldman points out that many of the lowest paying jobs, janitorial, maintenance, food service, sales and other service and support make a up a large percent of private sector jobs and are either not part of federal work or are the sort thing properly contracted out and not done by federal employees. The opposite end of the spectrum is also true: federal employees have higher level of education, professional degrees then average private sector.
Once you get past the right wing knee-jerk of public sector employees being unskilled pointless bureaucratic drones, and look at what we actually are, it puts a fresh perspective on the term Federal Employee.
On the other side, two-thirds of federal workers are classified as management or professional -- managers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers -- compared to less than a third of the private workforce.
In fact when adjusting for actual education, job title, type of work done, certification, etc, federal workers earn less then their comparable private sector employees, but may have better benefits and job security. That is, and has always been, the trade-off. It is also, what comes from being highly unionized. But as an insider, a career federal physician, I want to make another point about whatever the alleged recent short term trend may be:
Some of the criticism has implied that the Obama administration has created new high paying Senior Executive Service position with cronies. Having watched just that happen during the Bush years, this is clear-cut Republican projection. I am not saying this administration does not do crony appointments or that some of this could not be bad stuff, but...
What is true is that there have been a relatively lot of new positions created and new hires made in Dept of Defence, the Veterans Administration, and Health and Human Servces for relatively high salary health and mental health workers and related activities to deal with the long-term fallout of Afghanistan/Iraq wars, and neglect to military and veteran health under Bush/Cheney.
I am on some of job announcement email postings, and the number of these has definitely increased over the past two years. Obviously if you are hiring many more M.D.s, Clinical Psychologists, master’s and doctoral level social workers, Physiatrists and other rehabilitation specialists, then they may have higher average salaries than workers at Wal-Mart. If there have been even a few hundred more hires of masters and doctoral level health and mental health workers earning over say $120,000 each... well guess what. That is what they cost. In fact, they are demonstrably earning less in the public sector then they could be in the private sector at the same level of qualification and certification.
Also there has been a decrease in contracting out services, and more use of inherent government functions being done by government workers and not contractors. In addition to expensive health care workers, some of this also include expensive engineers and IT workers, for example. Again, my impression from the inside is a more of these are government hires and less contracted out then before.
Somebody with the investigative abilities and outsider ability to report on this may wish to follow-up.
Peace & Health