I’m suspicious of anyone who’s willing to do public service for well under the market value of their work. You should be too.
I got into an argument last week on twitter (I know, I’m really doing this wrong) about how much we should pay public employees. I had read about Mount Vernon’s Assistant Law Director who was making about $68,000 and how the city council was considering giving her a raise. She had received some better-paying offers in the private sector. Apparently she’s doing good work, because her boss wanted to give her the raise to ensure she stays around. Some of the members of city council were hesitant to pay her more though.
Now it’s worth noting up front that $68,000 is a very good salary. It’s well above the median household income for an Ohioan. The argument I’m about to make ignores the ridiculous income inequality and focuses on how to induce more high-skilled folks to work for and stay in public sector jobs. Ultimately, I believe that if we could make public sector work competitive with the private sector, we could start to see lower income inequality. Imagine if a food safety inspector working made as much inspecting meat processing facilities as they could make consulting for the processing company. They’d probably be less likely to take it easy on the industry and more likely to work to ensure that everything was above board.
So, getting back to our friend in Mount Vernon. $68,000 per year is good money, but if you’re a lawyer, it’s not. Nationally, the median salary for a lawyer is $113,000 with the bottom quartile of lawyers earning $74,880. In Ohio, the average lawyer makes $121,000. So, our lawyer working for the city is well in the bottom 25% of lawyers in terms of earnings and makes close to half the salary she could get. While I understand that corporate lawyers working for banks and gas companies are going to make way more than than a typical salary, even lawyers working at small firms or independently can expect to make good money. To be honest, it’s kind of incredible that she’d stay, given how much she could be making.
Why we need to pay for public service
The counterargument is that public service is a service. Therefore, it’s okay to compensate public servants a little less. They are, after all, servants – they have the privilege of serving the people and in many cases the notoriety that comes along with it, so the argument goes.
Sure, a public servant might get the feels when they help crime victims get justice, and they may even enjoy leading a community meeting about an important initiative (when they aren’t getting yelled at by attendees). But the feels don’t pay the bills. At the end of the day, low salaries in the public sector do two things:
- Keeps many people who are qualified from ever applying for public sector job
- Ensures that people in the job will always have better-paying options available to them if they want to get out like say, when they have to do thankless work (which is, like, all the time)
Effectively, it makes it hard for good public servants to find and stay in their jobs. Those who do take public sector jobs are often looking to advance their career quickly; they might not be super-invested in their current role and are probably constantly looking for ways up. It gets worse though.
Exclusion by Design
Low salaries in the public sector exclude less privileged groups of people from public sector jobs. The first generation college student and recent law school graduate who has loan debt will have a hard time taking the public defender job offer. Someone who’s trying to ends meet can’t be bothered to run for city council even though they’re sure they could beat the guy that’s running unopposed in their ward – they just can’t afford to give up their evening shifts. Workers who are supporting family members or who don’t have much wealth simply cannot afford to take a salary that’s well below their market rate (nor should they have to!).
Low-income and minority voices are already underrepresented in policy-making and governance, and low public sector salaries exacerbate the problem. The only people who can take the jobs are those who can afford the opportunity costs. The effect is a concentration of decision making power in the hands of those who can already afford to serve.
The people who end up in these roles are disproportionately wealthy, white, and land-owning. They are more likely to have inherited wealth or land. And while it’s certainly not true of 100% of the people involved in public debates, take a look around you next time you go to your local city council meeting. How many council members or people in the audience fit the above description? Are there any renters in the room? How many are landlords? If you’re in a small town, how many own farmland outside of town? Is it really a representative sample of your city? Probably not.
If we want more people to engage in public debate, we need to make it easier for more people to get involved.
And just so we’re super clear: I’m not knocking the good work that many public sector workers doing. I’m saying, we should pay those people a fair wage for their good work.
So, what should public employees make?
The answer is pretty simple: we should pay public employees a wage that’s comparable to what they could earn with their skillset in the private sector. Doing so would solve for the two problems: it would induce more qualified people to apply for jobs in the first place and then help keep good people in the public sector.
Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati are the 14th, 52nd, and 65th largest cities in the US, and the mayors have a lot of responsibilities, including the safety and well-being of the cities residents and visitors. These mayors are probably working at the same level of complexity and responsibility as executives of the 14th, 52nd, and 65th largest companies on the Fortune 500, Costco, Albertsons, and Cigna respectively. The base pay for the CEO of Cigna was $1.4 million (plus a whole lot more in bonuses, but let’s stick with base pay for now). $1.4 million would be a really high salary for a mayor, but then again, this is the mayor of a city with 2.1 million residents in the metro area. The mayor has a huge responsibility for their public safety and well-being. We have, rightfully so, high expectations for the mayor of Cincinnati; we should pay them in accordance with those expectations.
<rant> And before you throw rocks at me about paying mayors CEO-level pay, you should remember that this post isn’t about how wild it is that CEOs make that much money. If anything, this post highlights the major inequities we see in our labor markets, where value is given to people who can raise the prices of stocks, not to those who make the lives of those around them better. So, read on before you @ me. </rant>.
In smaller towns, mayors are less like CEOs and are more like managers. A typical middle manager makes about $85,000 per year.
Similarly, a lawyer working as a public defender or in the prosecutor’s office should make near the median salary, which as noted above is around $113,000 per year.
Wait, those numbers seem high!
Yes. That’s because the private sector pays skilled professionals and managers a lot of money (probably too much), while paying those at the low end of their org charts very little. Either way, private companies have high expectations of their workers. The public sector should have high expectations of its workers too, and the public sector should compensate their employees, all of them, at the top and the bottom of the pay scale, fairly.
For me the core question is: should we trust someone who’s willing to take a big pay cut to do service? If someone offered to clean your house for free (or really cheap), would you be a bit suspicious? I certainly would, and we should feel the same way about council members who claim to want to work for free or prosecutors who are happy to leave their high-paying job for a few years to shape public policy. The reality is, people who are willing to take the pay cuts or “volunteer” their time are getting something out of it: power. Of course, paying better salaries won’t eliminate that power dynamic – public servants will always wield some level of power. But if paying better wages induces more people to engage in the public debate, we’re less likely to hire (or have to vote for) folks who want to wield power for its own sake.
People who are willing to take the pay cuts or “volunteer” their time are getting something out of it: power.
Maybe, just maybe, if we start paying our public employees a fair amount of money, we’ll start to see the public sector compete with the private sector. We could induce some folks who work in the private sector to put their talents to work in creating a more just society, where incomes are more fairly distributed to everyone. We might start seeing a more diverse set of voices in public service. There could also be a knock-on effect of highlighting how ridiculous some private sector salaries are. Voters might demand higher taxes on the wealthy and controls on executive pay once they learn that the state and municipal workers’ salaries are pegged to private sector salaries.
I’m not 100% convinced that paying fair wages in the public sector is the silver bullet that will solve all of society’s ills. There are still a lot of problems to overcome. But I do believe that if we can create a more equitable and democratic society, we’ll be better equipped to tackle those problems. Having more diverse voices in government is better, and ultimately, the public sector should pay people a fair wage.