Public-Salary Disclosure Would Pay Off in the End : Government, private-sector employees should be able to tell if they are being paid fairly.
Pay, pensions and benefits are the major cost components of government. However, when you analyze and compare these cost components, as I have, you will find there is no rational basis for the huge disparity that exists in Orange County among the various government entities: cities, county, school districts, sanitation districts, water districts and colleges.
After years of doing government salary surveys, I have now reached this final conclusion: How much you make as a government employee has more to do with the political clout of your union than anything else. As for fairness and equity in pay, comparability with the private sector and availability of qualified applicants, forget it. These don’t mean much anymore.
Even worse, it is now becoming more difficult to figure out how much government employees really make. In the old days, it was easy to calculate and compare government pay, pensions and benefits. Not anymore!
Today, union contracts (usually called a Memorandum of Understanding or MOU) are hundreds of pages long and filled with a maze of provisions that are mind-boggling. For example, to calculate gross pay, you must carefully analyze and evaluate the entire MOU and consider: base pay, overtime pay, special assignment pay, educational incentive pay, upgrade pay, call-out pay, standby pay, sick leave pay, bilingual pay, shift-differential pay, longevity pay and other goodies often disguised in the MOU.
If you don’t understand something in the MOU, finding one person who really understands the entire MOU is next to impossible. Even the bureaucrats who are supposed to know don’t know for sure.
Unfortunately, at least for taxpayers, all this excessive complexity increases the cost of government. Often additional full-time staff must be hired to assist with personnel and budgets matters related to the interpretation and management of the MOU itself.
Why management negotiators allowed this bureaucratic monster to grow to such an extreme over the years is beyond me. Then again, if you think about it, it does offer them job security, doesn’t it.
In the past, base pay was a valid benchmark and a fair representation of what government employees were paid. But, believe me, that’s not true anymore. Nonetheless, management and union negotiators continue to emphasize this overrated benchmark even though they know it significantly understates compensation for most government employees, particularly fire and police.
Well, it’s time for the people to wake up and demand full disclosure on government salaries. Employees in the private sector have a right to compare their standard of living with that of government employees. Likewise, government employees have a right to compare their standard of living with that of other government employees. Making this comparison, however, is impossible to do at this time.
That’s why we need full disclosure on government salaries. But don’t count on the government bureaucrats to volunteer this information--they won’t. Undoubtedly, they will tell you it’s too costly to do, but that is a lie. They already have the information; so make them disclose it.
One way to do this is to get your governing board or City Council to adopt a resolution requiring full disclosure of total compensation. I’m fighting for one in the city of Anaheim.
I want the city to resolve that each year by March 31, the city manager shall make available to the public a list of full-time employees enumerating total compensation by department and job title for the preceding calendar year. No employee would be identified by name.
By now, I know what some of you are thinking. I’m just some radical who hates all government employees. Well, you’re dead wrong. I am a government employee.
