Government Salaries

Here are the salary tables for the pee-ons of government employment. The problem is hiring more people doesn't work becuase much of the contracting that requires more skill is fluid in its nature, unlike unskilled jobs like janitorial or copying which is coninuous but anyone can do. What benifit does it save for the government to hire the 20 engineers, scientists, drafters, & construction managers for a plant expansion that will take 2 years. When the job is done you can't get rid of them and are on the hook for their salaries, benfits and then pensions until they die. Where as with contracting you only pay for the work done and stop paying when the job is complete, then on top of that typically the most qualified with the lowest bid wins. Essientially it saves money in that the government can get a better job out of a specailist in a specific field and onyl pay for their services for a short period of time, rather than paying 50 or 60 years for it.

tP: Well an additional part of the problem is that the government has such a hard time getting rid of employees.

One must also factor in the extraordinarily generous benefit and pension packages government employees get. It makes the effective cost of hiring them much greater than their salaries would suggest.

In the mid-1970s, New York City was laying out 68 cents for benefits for every salary dollar it paid out. By comparison, a typical private Manhattan firm spent about 35 benefit cents per salary dollar paid. Just a tad outrageous, no?

hard time of getting rid of employees is an understatement, more like it takes an act of God.

MW--Actually DoD professionals (i.e. engineers, logisticians, program managers) don't make bad money. In the D.C. area (where I live) working level for an engineer (my job) is GS-13 which translates to from $75k to $97k per year depending on years of service, not great, but not bad either, especially when you consider the benefits. I get 20-days of paid vacation per year, plus 10 federal holidays. I also get 13 days of sick leave per year. We can contribute up to 15% per year to our 401k equivalent and the government matches 5%. One of our biggest benefits is our "compressed work week" where we work 9 hour days (8 hours on alternate Fridays) but get every other Friday off (26 additional days off per year). The extra time I get to spend with my wife and kids far outweighs any extra money I could have made going into the private sector.

Few other things that may be of interest...

Recently there have been public agencies esp. in the engineering fields that would bid out contracts which were nothing more than a temp staff hiring, where the people would work for the public agency, under the supervisors or the public agency, usually in the public agency's building except they would be an employee of the consultant and the benifits would be handled by the consulting firm. They do this for the basic reasons that they can get the person at the lowest bid, they can limit the contract time to as short as they want allowing them to simply not rebid or end the contract if money gets tight.

The other thing to figure is the reason consulting fees are marked up is it is to pay for all the overhead asscoiated with that employee not reflected in the salary. Which the public agency would have to pay anyways had they just hired the person. When you bid out you add in the additional cost that you pay too employ the person. All things assumed by the public agency when they hire. Of course when the contractor no longer works for them they no longer pay all the overhead for the employees.

As far as salary more often than not I found that the government jobs paid better than private sector jobs. Part of it is because you are really a loss for them when you are trained and gain experence, one company I interviewed with was very rigorous in their selection process because they loose over $200,000 for every new employee. Of course in the private sector their are more oportunities for advancement and jumping into higher salary, where as I found public sector work was far more structured in that sense. I also find two different types of public sector workers the lazy and the workers, there is no real incentive to work, you can quite easily avoid working and never get fired, that won't happen in the private. But of course it should be said in the public you can take initative and go get work and there are workers who do.

Overall in the long run its much cheaper for the government to contract work to skilled workers for short periods of time than hire them full time.

tP: I don't understand what you mean when you say that a company loses money for each new employee. Do you mean they it costs money to train them and so forth?

I don't think it would be cheaper to hire contractors if the government bureaucracy weren't so awful at management. But given that it is, you're probably right.

It was a combination of factors which they lost money, it was paying the people who teach the new employees, paying the new employees and in some cases the room and board expenses. Then they are ot conducting billable work so its all an overhead hit to the company. Infact most private companies in the engineering world do take some kind of hit when they hire someone, but for them its an investment because a good employee will make the money back over time.

I would say its not only bad management, but the generous contracts that are associated with government jobs (just look what they do to California) and the inability to get rid of people when there isn't work. Essentially to make it more cost effective for the government to hire employees, it would take many significant changes to current policy and operations to be true.

tP: Ok, I understand and agree with what you're saying. However, if the government had the same hiring/management capabilities as the private sector, they would benefit from hiring direct employees just like the private sector does. At least the ratio between direct/contract employees would be the same as in the private sector.