Many of us grew up in times when our public workers were deservedly revered. This was because they were positive and helpful despite being both overworked and underpaid.
Those days are long gone. Today, most public employees seem either apathetic or simply unwilling to help the taxpayers who pay their salaries. To make matters worse, today they are paid much better than their private industry equivalents.
That was colorfully announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a recent news release. The statisticians responsible told taxpayers that private industry employees make an average of $32.37 per hour, and that their counterparts in state and local governments make $40.24 per hour.
This difference is more significant when benefits are added to the picture. Each private industry employee receives an average of $13.68 per hour in benefits, compared to $25.04 per hour for the poor, humble public employee. That is an overall cost of $46.05 vs. $65.28 for our public employees. That is a whopping difference.
The disparity is dramatically illustrated by the Los Angeles Unified School District’s move to give starting teachers an annual pay rate of $77,000 and 15-year veterans pay of $125,156. That is before a rich benefits package and on top of the perk of having summers off. Meanwhile, the district is an overstaffed operation with shrinking enrollment that matriculates poorly educated students.
Those figures are for the period ended September 2025. You might notice that federal employees are not included in this study, meaning the pay disparity between them and private sector workers might be even worse.
Think of it this way: When you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to be harassed and ignored, the worker behind the counter is making more than the average person pleading to escape the DMV’s dysfunctional dystopia.
The BLS also released regional analyses of employee costs across the country for private industry. I asked a highly placed source in the Department of Labor why there are no similar regional studies for public employees, and I was told the sample size was too small.
I observed that there are 23.3 million public employees, 14% of all employees in the U.S. Twenty million are local and state employees.
The response I got was simply, “You have a good point.”
In addition, many public employees don’t pay into the Social Security system because they are covered by a richly funded pension program. All government employees are required to pay the Medicare tax of 1.45%. In states like California, Ohio, and Massachusetts, teachers, police, and firefighters don’t pay into the Social Security system.
Many of these public employees receive retirement benefits through a defined-benefit plan, while almost all of private industry employees have been converted to a defined-contribution plan.
The most prevalent pension plan today is the 401(k) plan. Employees with this kind of plan make contributions out of their earnings, often at least partially matched by the employer. Each account is in an individual employee’s name, who has control over it.
Defined-benefit plans, on the other hand, are made up entirely of employer contributions. Most public employees participate in these plans, in which the employer (the taxpayer) pays all the contributions, and the employee receives benefits based on time and service. These plans are often richly funded by elected officials voted in by the public unions. Instead of giving current raises to the employees, they increase these pension benefits, which are paid with future tax dollars.
These employer-funded benefits are not included in the above-cited calculations by the BLS, since they are somewhat nebulous and in the future.
Minnesota pension plans are currently underfunded by $17.5 billion, and California plans are underfunded by $300 billion. Yet these benefits continue to grow for former public employees and have been ruled by judges as “non-negotiable obligations.”
Public employees also receive lifetime health care benefits that were described to me by one spouse of a public employee retiree as “a Cadillac plan.”
Some of the additional benefits public employees enjoy are more holidays than private industry. In California, they receive a total of 12. I know for a fact that one major company with largely unionized employees provides eight.
One of the days that only public employees get off is the holiday formerly known as Cesar Chavez Day. Your head may have been spinning with how fast Democrats tossed Chavez out once allegations of sexual improprieties were brought forth 30 years after his death. Since then, his day has been known as “Farmworker Day,” ensuring all public employees continue to enjoy this day off while farmworkers continue their daily labor.
Even the calculations by the BLS don’t begin to touch the real compensation differential between public employees and private industry ones.
Our country still fosters this illusion of the public servant.
Some public employees do provide essential services that require great personal sacrifice, such as police and firefighters, but that is a small portion, even if pro-tax politicians regularly shove them in our face.. Most—including schoolteachers—are better paid than the public they serve without commensurate performance standards and with little chance of being relieved for poor performance.
They are now underworked and overpaid.
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