Texas public sector pay 17% lower than private, report says

The Dallas Morning News

Thursday, April 29, 2010

By ROBERT T. GARRETT

AUSTIN – Texas' public sector workers earn 17 percent less than private employees with comparable experience and education, a new study shows.

The gap was larger than it was nationally or in six other large states studied.

Researchers didn't pinpoint why pay of state and local government workers in Texas lags further behind private-sector employees than in other large states, such as Florida and California, said University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee economist John S. Heywood, the report's co-author.

He said nationally, though, the data since 1983 show a widening gap.

"Over the last 20 years, the earnings for state and local employees have declined relative to comparable private sector employees," especially since the late 1990s, Heywood said Wednesday.

Between 2000 and 2008, the U.S. averages were 11 percent less pay for state employees than for their private-sector counterparts and 12 percent less for local government workers, he said.

Although Texas and most other states face huge budget gaps as federal stimulus money recedes and the economy recovers slowly from a deep slump, Heywood said the study suggests that even at current pay levels, governments may have problems retaining key workers.

"Now is not the time for a large-scale rollback in the compensation of state and local workers," he said.

He and a colleague did the report for the Center for State & Local Government Excellence, which tries to help governments attract talented employees, and the National Institute on Retirement Security, a research organization created in 2007 to foster greater appreciation "of the value of retirement security" to workers and society as a whole.

Although Texas has weak unions, Heywood said he doubts lower levels of union membership explain much if any of the public-private sector pay differences here.

"Weak unionization is probably evident in both sectors [public and private] relative to other states," he said.