RALEIGH – Are public employees in North Carolina overworked and underpaid?
You can talk to many individual state and local employees and get a very clear, and affirmative, answer to this question. They view the current fiscal crisis as yet another threat to their livelihoods, either through layoffs (of themselves or their co-workers, the latter increasing the remaining employees’ workload) or a tiny or nonexistent pay raise.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau, however, do little to establish an objective case that North Carolina treats its employees poorly by national standards. First of all, as of 2001, North Carolina has far more state and local employees as a percentage of the population – 7.44 percent – than any of our neighbors. In fact, the rate of public employment in our state exceeds that New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and is well above the national average of 6.44 percent.
North Carolina isn’t a leader in public employee pay. But neither is it at the bottom of the heap. According to the latest Census information, for 2000, the average salary of a state or local employee in North Carolina was 26th in the nation at $32,677 with the national average at $37,153.
The situation is better than that, though, when you take into consideration non-wage benefits and variations in state cost-of-living. North Carolina was in the top tier of states in pension earnings as a percentage of benefits paid in 2000 (it is possible there has been some deterioration since then). And when I adjusted the 2000 salary data for cost-of-living, I found that North Carolina’s average was just over $34,000, putting us in the middle of the pack for the Southeast and a bit closer to the national average.
These two issues are, to some extent, linked. That is, if North Carolina state and local governments have more employees than their counterparts in other places, they are likely not to have as much money available to pay wages and benefits. In reality, one of the best ways to free up dollars to pay our good employees more and protect their pension and health plans would be to eliminate the lower-priority positions within state and local governments.