Wednesday, December 12, 2012

How to Control Public Sector Compensation

Politicians will never be able to effectively control public sector compensation in a democracy, since public employee organizations will always be much more involved than the average taxpayer.  Public sector compensation needs to be controlled by constitutional provisions that provide an automatic limitation to keep Government from overly burdening the private sector.

Every Jurisdiction authorized to impose taxes should be required to either:

1.  Adopt an ordinance explicitly linking public employee compensation to average private sector compensation within the jurisdiction, or

2.  Submit an audited report at least once every five years to the public comparing average private sector compensation within the jurisdiction with average public sector compensation (mean, median and mode).

Maximum compensation in every jurisdiction should be the amount paid to the highest elected official in the jurisdiction.

Public employees should be catagorized in two catagories:

1.  Career public servants who's compensation level is linked directly to private sector compensation within the jurisdiction.

2.  Learning experience positions paid at or near minimum wage.  Every citizen in the jurisdiction is entitled to such a position for a period of up to 1 year, after one year they can continue in the position but the longer they are in such position, the more controls on their behavior they must accept. 

1 comment:

Brian said...

Jan, the problem with tying public employee salaries to elected officials' salaries is that many city councils, etc. have part time elected officials overseeing highly technical employees with advanced degrees and full-time positions. Tying it to private sector has the drawback that we have very few private police forces or fire departments. And having taught in both public school and private school, I can tell you it's comparing apples to oranges. Won't work.