Federal Employees: Are They Overpaid or Underpaid?

December 19, 2018

[vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″ el_class=”section section1″][vc_column_text]Whenever it comes to salaries, things always tend to get complicated, and as such, the federal salary council was set to take action on their meeting which was mainly focusing on pay comparison results as well as formulating its recommendations on the same. All this is because of some comments that were made on major methodological concerns by a report from a president’s pay agent.

According to the council, the pay gap stood at 32% in the spring. Somehow despite an expected rise of 2.1% and 1.8% in 2017 and 2018 respectively, the gap closed from 34% in 2016. It’s really shocking that the difference is that huge up to now.

Having announced increases with step, promotion, and quality step increase, the totals have since then been very competitive. However, the best solution would be for the council to explain the 32% gap interpretation which makes very little sense. Employees are spread across 15 pay grades, and it is absurd for salaries to be that lower than the federal levels. Closing the game involves increasing US workers salary, and that would be almost unachievable.

The annual analysis has ever since then become a serious problem to deal with, and there is way too much inconsistency from workers and the organizations used as well. You can call it a classic black box calculation. However, the in current gap analysis, there is no comparison of the federal worker’s salaries and that of non-federal ones. Despite conducting numerous surveys here and there, none indeed pointed out precisely how well federal jobs are paid. Getting complete information on this would require a separate analysis.

Some divisions show that federal workers are overpaid like think tanks and congregational budget office. Other various studies agree to the same as well. Economist Gary Becker was the first to use the underlying methodology. And being a Nobel Prize winner, you can understand why. The famous phrase human capital is his best-known work yet. According to his analyses, education and experience always lead to better pay.

Now according to the critics, all this information about education level, work occupation, geographic location, gender, experience, dummy variable and ethnicity all explain the amount that a worker gets paid. Also, the analysis overlooks the aspect of most federal jobs. In reality, the problems faced by the federal workers are more complicated and harder than what the state and local government face. The problems also bring along great consequences and higher budgets. According to a population survey, the worker’s salaries should at least reflect their job’s level of accountability and impact on the society.

According to the business approach salary planning, determining the worker’s salary goes down to two main concerns. This is; exclusion of their value benefit from the pay comparisons since, salaries end up getting most attention and comparisons between the federal and non-federal salaries as they fail to completely reflect the real struggles they face, labor shortages and surplus.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”34344″ img_size=”292×285″ style=”vc_box_shadow”][/vc_column][/vc_row]