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Comment by dpifke | Hacker News Reader

Even when broken down by industry group and job type (apples-to-apples), public-sector employees make significantly more than their private-sector counterparts, see this Department of Labor press release:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf

(On page 3 is a comparison of % spent on different benefits for public- vs. private-sector; not sure what conclusions can be drawn from it.)

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Page 4: "Compensation cost levels in State and local government should not be directly compared with levels in private industry. Differences between these sectors stem from factors such as variation in work activities and occupational structures. Manufacturing and sales, for example, make up a large part of private industry work activities but are rare in State and local government. Professional and administrative support occupations (including teachers) account for two-thirds of the State and local government workforce, compared with one-half of private industry."

This varies very much depending on the state or department you work in. I work for the Government in Florida and the average IT pay was much lower than comparable jobs in the private sector. In IT I saw differences of about 20K in pay. I was looking at the salary scales and comparing them to the average for things like DBA/Sys Admin/Programmer.

Really it is the private sector employees that make much less than public employees. Except of course the CEOs and other way over paid executives.....

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