OPM’s John Berry skeptical of CBO study showing overpaid feds

[alp227]

Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry yesterday weighed in on the Congressional Budget Office study that found federal employees are compensated 16 percent higher than private sector employees. Long story short, Berry has his doubts and wants to see more from CBO on how they derived their figures.

Berry’s primary concern is that they may not have taken the complexity of jobs into account. For example, he said:

Let’s take a job — forklift operator. You’ve got a forklift operator in the private sector, a forklift operator in the public sector. Both have a high school diploma. Private sector forklift operator is moving furniture and boxes. Public sector forklift operator is taking nuclear-tipped torpedoes and loading them into a very tight area on a multibillion-dollar nuclear submarine, where one wrong move could have very dire implications.

Would you pay both people the same? No. So it underscores the difficulty when one looks and says, high school degree here, high school degree here, why is this one getting paid more? My answer to that would be, complexity of the work has got to be considered. [...] To me, unless you look at the complexity of the job, it becomes almost irrelevant.

full: http://blogs.federaltimes.com/federal-times-blog/2012/02/02/opms-john-berry-skeptical-of-cbo-study-showing-overpaid-feds/

[rfranklin]

1. the bottom line is that the private sector employees are not paid enough...

The idea that the money grubbing "job creators" should determine what is an appropriate salary is ridiculous. These are people who are paying people less than three dollars a day for factory work in Haiti and bitching because they have to pay an extra 10 cents an hour. They would make people slaves if they could.

[RC]

2. Up until the bu$h administration, government employees were paid less than their Private sector

counter parts. Now, wiht outsourcing and other job loses, it is the other way around because the wages of the private sector have fallen. Those same greedy people are now trying to say government employees are being paid too much. Public sector pay has not been keeping up with inflation for years, even before bu$h.

We need to get our Living-Wage-Jobs back into this country. It really does not matter whether it is a public sector or a private sector job. The money from the wages for both circulate through the same economy. Cutting salaries for either damages the economy. A living wage job is a living wage job whether it is public of private sector.

[nanabugg]

3. What is happening now is that the "lovable" private sector has turned on its employees

union busting, wage busting, and hiring a lot of low-wage immigrant workers. The uber wealthy don't count in the workforce because they DON'T WORK, they just collect. The the new private sector has screwed over the workforce and now that makes it look like the government, which has to follow anti-discrimination rules, and worker rights rules, and is pretty good at looking out for it's employees...it makes it look like Federal workers are over paid or paid higher wages when, in fact, the capitalistic private sector has just worked so hard under the GOP to lower the standard of living for its employees.