US Federal Employee Salaries (2012)
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In Sweden, all the tax records are public information. You can literally look up how much your neighbor makes in a year. So each year after tax season, the tabloids all print up huge lists of "the richest people in YOUR neighborhood!". I've always been disappointed that with all this data, they've never gone beyond that and visualized the data geographically.
Everyone on here has a blue fit over the NSA but is fine with this!
Read the contract you signed when you took a job. I bet it'll be entertaining and instructive. Don't take anything I say, or indeed the contract you signed, as legal advice.
You do however, retain the right to terminate your employment (no matter what the contract says, and it must be free to do so, provided a certain period of notice is respected), and get back full enjoyment of your rights.
UNHCR # 12 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
As well as my rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"
No valid reason exists for individual salary's to be posted just as with the blackmail scam with mugshots proves.
Your doctor knows, your parents know and your insurance company probably knows, but does that mean you broadcast to the world that you have a third testicle?
Income data can be used for a slew of criminal activity. I wonder if you can correlate the release of the data with burglaries or other crimes spiking in the relatively wealthier households, compared to their neighbors.
That is where the desire for wage privacy comes from for me. Talking about how much you make, outside the workplace, has no benefits. It is just going to make the conversation awkward, or somebody is going to feel bad about themselves, or somebody is going to get an irritating spark of envy where none needed to exist. As far as I am concerned, you may as well publicize dick length.
(Public employees opt-in to the public knowing how much they make. The reason the public gets to know in that case is because the public is paying that salary. There is an employee/employer relationship there.)
Discussing wages with your employers/colleagues has advantages, and without it collective bargaining is difficult to impossible. However coworkers account for a slight fraction of those that most people interact with.
There is no utility in me (someone who works in tech) telling my brother (who works in aerospace) how much I make, and vice versa.
The people that I know who work for the federal government simply say "I'm a mathematician at NASA", not "I'm a GS-13, Step 4 mathematician and BTW, I got a bonus of X last year."
And non secret isy different from rubbing in someone's face
a side note: It is generally accepted that the US government pays the highest salaries compared to other government agencies worldwide. This is the reason why the U.N. uses the US government scales and pays as their base (highest salaries of all member states) - of course before they put their "gravy" on it and more than double it.
...and as salaries are normally paid besides tax free also tax equalized (the US is demanding income taxes from all citizens wherever they live including UN staff - the UN covers these taxes for US citizens and a handful other countries) the US pays itself back (via income tax) a nice discount of certainly 10% of its contributions to the UN.
Private vs. public isn't such a teeth-gnashing, nail-biting dilemma for many other countries, who generally seem to do a better job of mentally separating the two sectors. The general agreement in other countries is that public = stable job, lower pay, higher "public service" calling; private = higher salary, less stability, etc.
Of course, this isn't taking into account countries like China -- where a government position is the best route into cushy, lucrative gigs in the private sector, and in fact, that's often the entire point. (To some degree, this is also the case in the US, at least at the higher levels of public service.) But I digress.
clarification edit: this is the end result of a new feature that allows enigma users to publicly share a frozen table state (up to 10 pages), which takes into place the current filter/sort state
[name removed] DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH SERVICE LIBRARIAN Maryland Prince George's County BELTSVILLE GS 14 119238
I know the GS schedule is based on how long you work as opposed to how well you work, but i didn't think that non-STEM or non-Management roles made above GS11 or 12.
Perhaps the term librarian means something other than what we think it does, like the librarian of congress. Perhaps its a supervisor at an enormous library. I really hope we aren't paying 90k+ for someone to check out books about farming.
GS grades tend to correspond to scope of work, degree of education required and scope of responsibilities. If the work doesn't require a college degree, don't expect anything above GS-9, and probably no better than GS-7. If it's "business ops" that requires a degree but has limited responsibilities you might be a GS-11, engineers are (after their "apprenticeship" period) between GS-11 and GS-13 (essentially, education + depth of knowledge, most GS-13 engineers will be SMEs, subject matter experts). Supervisors will typically be one grade above those they supervise, maybe on par with SMEs, with a typical minimum grade of GS-11. So a supervisor in charge of 40 engineers might be a GS-13, their boss would be a GS-14 and that persons boss a GS-15.
They also employee the advanced degree educated professional librarians you are talking about too.
I was disagreeing that public libraries cater to only the lowly forms of society (homeless and children) and don't require educated librarians. They do more than babysit and they employ such librarians. They also employ, for example, teenagers to stock shelves.
At a research library – and if, as it appears, this is http://www.nal.usda.gov/ it's one of a small number of major national libraries – it's common for librarians to provide expert advice. It's not “Get me [ISBN]” so much as “I'm looking for information on a topic. Can you find good sources?”
I'm not a government employee, directly, but I am a contractor that has been furloughed for two weeks now, and I'm happier than I've been in a long while. And no, I won't get back pay; the first two weeks were "administrative leave", which I have to make up (typically with vacation time), and starting this week the charge code is leave without pay.
Apparently, my job sucks worse than I thought.
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/10/09/backlog-of-va-disab...
http://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2013/10/back-pay-furloug...
There is no guarantee they will be paid! If they will, it will have to be specifically specified in the new budget. Why does everyone act like it is a given?
How about a "probably" instead?
Working for the government can be great, depending on who you work for and whether or not it fits your personality, but don't be deluded into thinking that the majority of government employees have cushy, high paying jobs.
Note: Politicians and Senior Executive Service employees are a different story, many of them are overpaid and ineffective at their jobs.
GS-15 = O-6 (Colonel/Navy Captain)
GS-14 = O-5 (Lt Colonel/Commander)
GS-13 = O-4 (Major)
GS-12 = O-3 (Captain, this is the journeyman level for engineesr)
GS-9/11 = O-1/2 (Lt's, apprentice stage)
GS doesn't start at 9, though. The lower grades are typically limited scope, no supervisory responsibility, office jobs (secretaries, mail room, clerk, data entry, etc.). Or they're training positions, straight out of college an engineer may be a GS-5/7 and after 2-4 years a GS-11/12. They don't really have a clean comparison to military ranks, that I know of.
They do, but you have to start going into the enlisted ranks for best comparisons. GS-7 might be E-6/E-7, GS-5 would be E-4/E-5, etc.
If you look at responsibility, it seems to fit.
Likewise just as D.C. has peculiar effects on the military rank of typical workers, so does it have peculiar effects on the civilian grade of workers, due to the position classification principle of "scope of effect".
But the Navy normally uses O5 to command ships of similar crew size. Very rarely, even O4... it all depends on what exactly the ship is, and what the expected mission set of that ship is.
Obviously the Navy wouldn't slot a random O4 into minesweeper command even though it's a small ship, so you're really talking about a "better than average" O4 even for those, it just reflects back to how scope of responsibility can change things even for the Navy.
The sheer number of government employees is amazing especially when you consider you have to add on top of these numbers those at state, city, and local, levels.
The base salary would double. However they'd be left without a pension, and other benefits though I think the pension is easily the largest monetary value.
Let's use as an example someone with 20 years of federal service and a highest 3 years salary of $150k. The FERS benefit is roughly 1.1% * 20 * 150k = $33k/year. That's a 25-year annuity of $450k. To accumulate $450k over 20 years, that's about $12k per year, or 8% of income. People who serve longer will get a bigger pension, but the nature of the $100k+ positions in the federal government is that they require advanced degrees, extensive work experience in the private sector, etc, which limits the overall length of service.
If you're an educated professional (say an antitrust economist at the DOJ), you'll make a lot less money in federal service even accounting for benefits. On the other hand, if you're a document clerk, you'll make a lot more.
So:
1. Microeconomics is seriously, perhaps completely, wrong; or, 2. Federal employees are much more motivated by non-financial rewards, such as the satisfaction of public service, than the rest of us, and are, therefore, better people than the rest of us; or, 3. They couldn't make more in the private sector, and would probably make less.
Take your pick.
I've worked both sides of the fence, so I'm not flinging arrows.
There are people who enjoy public service, that doesn't make them better or worse than the rest of us. I served in the Army for almost a decade, it doesn't mean I'm better than anyone.
The "can't make it in the private sector" argument is ridiculous. Everyone who has ever worked at a sizable organization, both for the government and in the private sector, has known someone that was completely incompetent yet still remained employed. Sometimes people just slip through the cracks, it doesn't matter where you are. What's funny is that on one hand we have civilians saying that federal employees couldn't make it on the outside, and on the other side whenever someone gets out of the military, there will be those who say its because that person "couldn't cut it." It's childish and counterproductive nearly all of the time.
Two reasons that come to mind that you haven't mentioned are free travel and a stable employment situation. Right now things are kind of screwed up, but generally speaking, government jobs are stable. You might have to move, but at least you know that you'll have a job unless you give them a good reason to let you go.
One of the smartest people I know has been a software engineer for about 5-7 years, he gets treated like crap at his private sector company, and makes well below market value. I honestly have no idea why he stays at his company, but I do know enough to realize that I won't be able to explain it with a mathematical model.
Second, if you want to be an infantryman, fly a jet, work with missiles, etc, most of the jobs are military. And there are subcultures found only in the military that some people find very appealing. The models are smart enough to consider such factors.
But the motivations and cultures of the military and civilian employment writ large are VASTLY different. Lumping the civilians in with the military and declaring it all good is way too simple. There are huge chunks of the government where the work is really no different than similar work in the private sector.
The postal service and UPS is only one example -- there are some unique functions and activities in USPS, out in rural areas, but the vast majority of it is pretty much the same as USPS. Wanna bet that postal workers are paid more than USPS workers? Or on their turnover ratios?
It isn't too hard to see the best parts of the government, they're pretty interesting and do important stuff. But those parts make a surprisingly small fraction of the total activity.
There are also other, less appreciated aspects: e.g. federal employees work is in the public domain by default which means a lot of people can work on open-source software without fighting corporate culture:
http://government.github.com/community/
The number of jobs where that's true is a small subset of the number of jobs which pay more in the private sector.
The other big factor you're missing is the stability: if you have a family, disabilities or health problems, etc. something like the startup scene is a lot less appealing compared to a job where there are legal mandates against death-march project management. Given the skew towards mid-to-senior level positions, I'm also sure that a lot of people saw the appeal of an employer which has strict rules against age discrimination, too.
This is not to say that they couldn't make more money but that they're making tradeoffs for the likely future value based on their personal risk exposure. Arguably #1 is true but really it's irrelevant because anything as complicated as your career seems outside of the scope of microeconomics.
One small thing that's nice is the column summaries: http://cl.ly/image/2D1S2h0o0B09.
I know it's probably your core business and all, but from a civic standpoint, would you mind posting the raw data so we can play with it?
EDIT:
Thanks folks!
Location with highest average salary among stations with >25 federal employees:
Islip, NY - 496 employees
$43,162 min
$140,781 avg
$179,700 max
Meanwhile, Islip is the home of McCarthur Airport, a medium sized airport that serves the east end of Long Island.
I was born in DC and grew up in the area, as such I know a lot of current federal employees who should be on a 2012 list. I grepped for a handful of names of folks I know personally and so far found only one. (For privacy reasons I will not share the names of non-matches here.)
Update: Ok, I've found two now. Still many more non-matches than matches.
http://php.app.com/fed_employees11/search.php
...obtained by Asbury Park Press via a FOIA. It doesn’t include FBI, CIA, Defense Department, or IRS employees, or employees involved in security work, nuclear materials or national security matters.
Edit: Just after your quoted part it says:
> does not cover the White House, Congress, the Postal Service, and independent agencies and commissions.
and here's a link to a full export (csv): https://s3.amazonaws.com/enigma-data-export/shutdown/enigma-...
I don't think variance is being calculated correctly
Also, let's not forget the cost of living in DC.
Bethesda and Rockville are, for all practical purposes, "DC", as are Beltsville, Suitland, Arlington, VA, and a bunch of other locations that are listed in that data. Segmenting them out is like not considering MIT or Harvard as part of the college scene in Boston because they are in Cambridge, which is just being uselessly pedantic.
For the folks misunderstanding that comment:
The link goes straight to at least ten pages of positions with USDA which is located in Beltsville, about 10 miles outside of DC. Bethesda and Rockville, both of which are in the top five, are other also DC suburbs. At a glance there are 300K+ positions in the DMV area, a significant percentage of the 1.3M listed.