MBPC Report Shows that Mass. Public Sector Workers Are Not Living Large

The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center recently issued an interesting corrective to the last couple of years of fierce attacks on public sector workers by conservatives here in the Bay State and around the nation. It came in the form of a paper with a rather dry title, Workforce Characteristics and Wages in the Public and Private Sectors, that packs quite a wallop upon even a cursory review. Long story short, if you've joined us here at Open Media Boston in thinking that many right-wingers were totally blowing smoke with claims that hard-working public servants like Mass. teachers and firefighters and social workers are bankrupting the state with supposedly sky high salaries and fantastic benefits, you'll want to read this report straightaway.

As cooler heads might expect, the many Tea Party loving bloviators in our fair Commonwealth and beyond have skipped a key fact in their assaults on the largely unionized public sector workers - most public workers are required to be highly educated; so unless you compare private sector workers with comparable education levels to public sector workers, you come up with skewed data.

To quote from the report

"When education is taken into account, public sector workers with a four-year college degree or more (60 percent of the public sector workforce) are paid less, on average, than private sector workers with the same level of education. Public sector jobs, however, more often require a college or advanced degree than do private sector jobs. Thus, a comparison of the entire public sector workforce with the entire private sector workforce in the state shows higher overall wages in the sector with more college graduates, the public sector.

"The data also show that for workers in Massachusetts with only a high school degree or less, wages are low and stagnant in both the private sector and the public sector. This is a serious problem and an important issue for policymakers at both the state and national level to address. It is not, however, an issue about a differential between public and private sector wages. It is a separate problem that can be addressed best by policies that would increase wages and expand access to employee benefits in the private sector, or policies that help more people to receive higher levels of education.

"Failing to control for the significant differences in the public and private sector workforces has led some to claim that state and local government workers earn more than private sector workers. As other national and regional reports have shown, factors such as age, experience and gender have an influence on an individual workers’ earning potential and that when these factors are accounted for, public sector workers do not earn more than their private sector counterparts."

That's good to know, and I suggest that you all spread the word on that score to everyone in your personal networks. "Each one reach one" is always a good strategy to move this kind of info from person to person at high speed.

However, I do want to say that I think it's a mistake to combat the right-wing attacks on the only remaining labor sector with a high rate of unionization by saying "don't fear us, we don't make that much money."

Because, naturally, because of being unionized for some decades, public sector workers (aside from those that have high school degrees or less, as the report properly points out) make a good living in general compared to many many people with lousy private sector jobs or, increasingly, no jobs at all.

Which makes it pretty easy - good reports from progressive researchers notwithstanding - for conservatives to continue to prosecute their ongoing divide-and-conquer strategy aimed at setting working people with decent jobs and working people without decent jobs at each others throats ... while the corporate leaders ultimately behind all these attacks laugh all the way to completing their looting of the public till and their destruction of the one force that currently has any possibility of stopping them, labor unions.

Far better to combat the anti-worker right-wing by saying "we're not going the save the Commonwealth (or the US) by wiping out public sector workers, we're only going to get things going in the right direction again if we can create good jobs like public sector jobs for all working people."

Of course doing that would require a complete volte-face in current political and economic policy in our fair state (and nation). We'd have to reinstitute fair taxes (that is to say, taxes) on the corporations and the rich. And use the huge new influx of funds to create public sector jobs for everyone that needs them. Then we'd need to reinstate the right to unionization in all industrial sectors, and allow the unions to bargain for decent wages and benefits for ALL working people - regardless of whether they directly represent them or not (which would encourage good, broad-thinking initiatives by sometimes parochial labor leaders). And put lots of money into reviving all our public services - while hopefully cutting our federal war (sorry, "defense") budget by 50-90 percent, releasing nearly as much money as we could conceivably spend to revive the fortunes of working families for the forseeable future.

Funny thing is that I'm not calling for anything that hasn't existed before. But I am calling for the only kind of reforms that have any hope of ending the "race to the bottom" for working people here and around the world ... who pretty much have two choices - follow the right-wing into the perdition of labor markets with no regulation of any kind (that is, back to the 19th century), or restore labor standards back to where they were 40 years ago and move forward from there.

A tall order, I guess. But think it over.

In the meantime, be glad that groups like the Mass. Budget and Policy Center are blowing useful holes in the balloon of conservative propaganda against unionized public sector workers. Because if public sector jobs are destroyed, I truly fear for our future. But progressives need to think big to avoid that sorry fate. And "big" means having a much broader vision than simply trying to defend the shrinking number of progressive reforms from past eras. Big is pushing for new reforms. Right about nnnnnnnnnow.

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston