Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Surprise! Union Public Employees DO Earn More

As one might have suspected, the EPI "wage survey" didn't paint the whole picture.

Today, the Center for Union Facts released a new analysis proving that public sector employees, on average, earn five percent more in wages and benefits than their counterparts in the private sector. This flies in the face of data from the Economic Policy Institute (EcPI), a “think tank” that has taken millions from labor unions and has released a series of studies making the counterintuitive claim that public sector employees are underpaid by four percent when compared to those in the private sector.

Redoing the same analysis from EcPI’s study, the Center for Union Facts controlled for two key factors that EcPI improperly accounted for: private sector business size and the treatment of full-time, part-year workers (a category that includes roughly one quarter of all teachers). When those two factors are properly considered, the results reverse themselves: public sector, taxpayer-funded employees actually enjoy a compensation bonus of at least five percent.

Actually, there are more factors which should be taken into account:

“And that doesn’t even include other unaccounted for factors, like the ironclad job security in the public sector and the fact that most teachers’ full-time salary covers a work year only 36 weeks long.

You can access the study at the link.

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