[quote=livinincali][quote=CA renter]Ditto what BG said about public and private employment and the opportunity to move up or increase your compensation.
More anecdotal stuff, but when I worked in the private sector, I quickly advanced from an entry level position to management, and was able to multiply my compensation many times over within a few years. That’s VERY difficult to do in the public sector.
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Well of course. The public sector rarely rewards performance and instead rewards time served. How do you expect to move up quickly in the public sector when various work rules established by unions prevent you from doing so. Wait until you earn seniority rather than performing to earn seniority.
The bottom line for the public sector is their wages and benefits as a whole cannot grow faster than the tax base. The tax base is heavily dependent on economic growth so when you have weak growth and recessions over the past decade the public sector needs to slow down wage/benefit growth and yet they haven’t. If the tax base is growing at 2% per year than public sector wages and benefits as a whole can only grow at 2% per year and probably should grow slower than that considering the budget difficulties.
They way they’ve avoided realizing that fact is by increasing the percentage of department budgets towards wages and benefits and deferred maintenance/discretionary hoping the budget would catch up. It unfortunately didn’t and now there’s a fight to increase taxes because those plans for growth didn’t materialize.
When you work for a private company it has the ability to growth at a rate faster than GDP, i.e. AAPL growing 50%+ per year, so employees have a chance to reap the reward of that growth. The worker bees may not reap enough of that growth, but they do have the opportunity to. If your company is growing at 10 or 20% per year than maybe you can get 5%+ raises. If you aren’t growing then you probably aren’t getting anything and perhaps a pay cut. The GDP isn’t growing and the public sector employees demand their raises so we must raise taxes.[/quote]
Yes, but the point was that this is a perk that these anti-union folks were not taking into consideration from what I could tell. If they want to value “job security,” then they also have to value the ability to move up and rake in bonuses in the private sector, as well.
Also, it’s not true that you just have to sit and wait for seniority in order to move up in the public sector. Some people fast-track their way to management, though it does take longer in the public sector than in the private sector. One of the main differences is that the pay does not increase as much when you move up in the public sector as it does in the private sector. The gap between wages/salary of the entry-level positions and the compensation of those at the top is much narrower in the public sector…as it should be, IMHO.
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Just to be clear, most public employees have not had net raises since about 2008. Many (if not most) are actually making less than they were in 2008, and when you take the pension reform into consideration, they will probably end up making about 10-20% less in the next few years than they were making in 2008, and that is NOT taking into account the other concessions that were being made as the economy slowed.
Not sure where the info is coming from WRT public employees getting raises. Most new contracts are keeping compensation the same, or reducing it. With the pension reform that has already passed, it is a definite double-digit percentage net loss for most employees from ~2008 levels.
