Two Takes on Federal Pay Debate

Derek Thompson, a blogger at theAtlantic.com (part of Atlantic Media, Nextgov's parent company as well) tries to add more insight into the ongoing (and confusing) debate about whether federal workers make more or less than their private sector counterparts.

Thompson posted edited excerpts from two interviews with researchers who have looked into this difference, one with Christian Weller, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, and another with Andrew Biggs, a scholar with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Guess what. They disagree.

I encourage you to read both interviews but here are a couple take aways from each.

On why shouldn't federal workers get paid more, after all, they work on some pretty important and complicated stuff, Thompson points out:

In general, the pay premium is very large for low skilled workers, and small or negative for highly skilled workers, like your SEC regulators. But most people don't have MDs or PhDs. Up through a Masters, you'll find on average that people make more in the federal government, especially at the low end with folks like paper clerks.

From Weller on why there's so much confusion on this issue:

The people who make that argument [that federal workers make more than private sector workers] often simply compare average wages. That's wrong because the public sector has substantially more degrees than the private sector.