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Comment by think814 | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, the well being of taxpayers should take precedence over a relatively small number of gov't workers.

Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period. If gov't employees don't like it, they should quit and find another job like everyone else.

In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider. There was an article here at HNews a few weeks ago about a study that pointed out people making $75/hr in the tunnels to do more or less nothing.

Why do we care about the well being of few thousand workers over millions of taxpayers, many of whom make less than the gov't / union employees? makes no sense.

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Yet this very site thinks paying these wages to Google interns is just fine. I have 4 decades of experience and deliver products that make $100M a year and I don't get paid these salaries because I don't work for a FAANG company, nor live in NY or SF, and am quite happy with what I make because the cost of living is reasonable and I like it here.

The median union worker does not make $400,000 a year in any city in the US. Picking extremes and calling it the norm is just picking facts to promote an opinion.

Whether you support or dislike unions in general is no reason to argue without useful facts to allow for reasoned discussion. This isn't Reddit.

I doubt that Google interns are making $200K-300K/yr.

Even if they were, I grant companies far greater leeway to set the wages that make sense for them, with the only control being whether I'm willing to shop there and/or hold their shares. Government salaries should be subject to greater public scrutiny than corporate compensation, IMO.

The only thing that needs to happen for government workers is removal of defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare. Once those fudge-able numbers are removed from the equation, the overpaying by promising future taxpayer money will automatically stop.

Honest question: how does removing pensions and retirement healthcare eliminate overpaid salaries? I don’t see the connection.

The real cost of those benefits decades into the future aren’t properly reflected in government budgets. It allows politicians to promise lavish benefits who need the votes from the government employee unions, and then the costs get understated, or just straight up ignored since who is going to force the government to set aside money for the future? End result is people today paying for labor performed decades ago, and not allowing for proper pricing of government labor compared to private sector.

For proof, check your local and state government pension plans reports. And note that those numbers are optimistic by at least 30% (compared to how the government forces private employers to value defined benefit pension liabilities).

> In my opinion, the well being of taxpayers should take precedence over a relatively small number of gov't workers.

Pay and treat public workers like shit, especially in high-demand high-skill professions, and good luck trying to recruit and retain anyone even semicompetent.

> Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period.

Government usually pays well-below-market salaries, and still-below-market total comp, which is why it disproportionately attracts people who either prefer stability of the particular style of benefit structure it provides, who have a strong preference for a particular field of endeavor unique to the public sector, or who simply can't hack it in the private sector.

> In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider.

Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.

> when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up

Or it's the inefficiency that you get when you can't recruit and retrain the best workers, especially in management and knowledge-worker positions, because the best workers can make much more money in the private sector.

> Government usually pays well-below-market salaries

That may be true for base salaries, but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case. If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse; however that's not happening. I know from personal experience people that get government jobs and act like they won the lottery.

> Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.

In NYC at least, public projects like subway construction use by law or by convention only union labor. That's a huge cost driver. You are right that that's private unions when it comes to construction, however when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up and resisting any modernization that would make the system more efficient.

You are also right that contractor oversight sucks and that's also a cost driver; both are valid issues.

> > Government usually pays well-below-market salaries

> That may be true for base salaries,

That's specifically what the phrase you quoted refers to.

> but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case.

It's still below market, though not as much. As I said in the next phrase in the same sentence from the one you quoted.

> If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse

No, if what I said was true, government would (as I said, again, in the same sentence you pulled the quote from) disproportionately end up employing those with noncompensation reasons to choose the particular work, and those of below average competence. Which it does. Government employees would only quit en masse if the below-market pay was a sudden transition from at-market pay.

Something you may not have considered - in countries where public servants are paid poorly, the result is widespread government corruption. In Nicaragua, for example, the police are so badly underfunded that if you want their help, you may be asked to pay for the gasoline to run their cars. If you can't pay, you don't get help.

This type of behaviour is massively wasteful and a drain on the wealth of a country. It's wise to avoid it.

Given that it's a relatively small number of employees, you're saving what, a couple cents a year by putting all these workers at minimum wage or lower and forcing them to work for tips?

19,000 is a small number?

Unions are not why building things in America is expensive. Its orders of magnitude cheaper to build things in France, a country with extremely strong unions.

Unions as implemented in the US are absolutely part of the problem. They have an adversarial relationship with management and are frequently (seemingly always) corrupt.

Wow. Is it opposite day where you’re at, or what?

Corruption in union leadership is defined as cooperating with management instead of cooperating with workers, i.e. the union. That’s literally the problem. And there’s an objective history of why it happens in the US. See: AFL-CIO pact, Taft-Hartley Act, Cold War, McCarthyism, etc.

French workers weren’t necessarily upset with the Soviets after the war. ;)

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