Bringing Home the Big Bucks in the Public Sector

[Omaha Steve]

http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/bringing-home-big-bucks-public-sector.html




Research by many scholars has shown that privatization does not save taxpayer money Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP


By David Cay Johnston / March 5, 2014 10:23 PM EST

Given all the news these days about public sector pay, three important questions to answer are: Which jobs funded by tax dollars pay the most? How much do they pay? And who holds those jobs?

Let's start with teachers. Average teacher pay last school year was under $57,000, but the highest-paid educator the taxpayers support earned $9.5 million last year. Those big bucks went to Nathaniel A. Davis, the chief executive officer and chairman of the board of K12 Inc., which runs virtual privatized schools for taxpayers.

What of garbage removal, the stinky work of burly men whose wages Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to get modestly increased back in 1968 when he was murdered in Memphis? These days, you can haul in $7.7 million a year in garbage. That big payday went to David Steiner, CEO of Waste Management, who also owns about $59 million worth of stock in the company that contracts to pick up garbage for cities, towns and counties, but also has private-pay customers.

And how about prison guards? Newspapers often run stories on how some guards rack up overtime to make more than $100,000 a year. But pay in this field can range as high as $6 million. That is what GEO Corporation paid CEO George Zoley in 2012. GEO operates jails and prisons with about 77,000 beds that, it boasts to shareholders, are occupied 96 percent of the time with inmates - adult and juvenile.

FULL story at link.

[Omaha Steve]

1. Kick