A new Total Compensation Survey report for Washington state employees has been released. It shows that most Washington state employees are paid less than the going market rates for their kind of work, often quite a lot less.
Some specific highlights of the report:
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Eighty-two percent of Washington's state employees are paid below Washington's overall public- and private-sector market rates for similar work. This breaks down as follows:
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Nineteen percent of us are paid between 1% and 10% below the market rate.
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Thirty-three percent of us are paid 11% to 25% below the market rate.
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Thirty percent are paid below the market rate by more than 25%.
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Only eighteen percent of us are paid at or above the market rate for our work.
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For example, nurses are paid 17.5% less than market rates, and information technology specialists are paid 32.5% less.
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Vacation, holiday, and sick leave benefits for state employees are roughly comparable with the overall market.
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State employees pay roughly the same as other workers for their own individual health insurance coverage, but we do get a better bargain when we add coverage for our families.
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Retirement funding is a mixed bag -- most of us still have some kind of traditional defined-benefit pension, which has largely disappeared in the private sector. On the other hand, many employers offer matching funds for individual retirement savings plans like 401(k)s, but we (classified staff at WWU, anyway) get none for our similar PERS-3 and Deferred Compensation plans.
Additional reading:
News coverage in The Olympian: http://www.theolympian.com/2010/05/06/1229818/state-workers-still-earn-l...
Good editorial in the Olympian: http://www.theolympian.com/2010/05/12/1235899/salary-report-shakes-up-st...
The official report: http://www.dop.wa.gov/CompClass/Compensation/Pages/TotalCompensationSurv...
[UPDATE: See how WWU compares to state employees overall here.]
