Dear Editor:
RE: Over 70 municipal employees on ‘Sunshine List’ of public sector workers making $100,000, April 4.
Every year until this year the “Sunshine List” article has been on the front page of the Wellington Advertiser. I was disappointed that the article only got to page 3 this year.
Having always worked in the private sector, it is with disgust that I review the exorbitant salaries we insist on paying bureaucrats. Unfortunately, until this year, I have never had any really hard facts to write about. I have sensed that the public sector employees have been overpaid for a very long time, but couldn’t quite pinpoint how to vocalize the disparity.
To quote the Advertiser’s article, “…the province’s Treasury Board Secretariat notes the average private sector worker in Ontario makes 33.6% less than the average public sector employee.” Now let’s interpret these numbers.
For easy figuring, I am going to use the public sector employee’s wage of $100,000, 33.6 % of which is $33,600; if we take $33,600 off $100,000 we get $66,400, which seems about right for a private sector employee. What becomes even more sinister is if we use the difference ($33,600) as a percentage of the private sector wage ($66,400), we end up with 50.6%; so in other words, the average public sector employee is making almost 51% more than a private sector employee.
I have heard the argument that the private sector simply needs to catch up to the public sector. Well I am here to state that whoever thinks that is not in touch with the real world. The private sector is subject to real world pressures such as reaching a market (marketing, advertising, sales), outside competition and taxes (did you know that the HST exemption amount for small business hasn’t changed since the GST came into effect in 1990? I wonder how many bureaucrats have had their pay cheques frozen since 1990).
I can go into location pressures, staffing pressures, conformity pressures, financing pressures, payroll pressures, and a myriad of other issues business (both large and small) have to deal with on a daily basis just to keep their doors open. It is like balancing on a ball bearing, one wrong move and everything can come tumbling down.
On the other side of the coin, the public sector really doesn’t have any form of feedback loop. We elect officials to entrust them with the best interest of the taxpayer (which by the way is our only form of feedback loop), yet they create laws and mandates that won’t allow for real world competition with the private sector.
This in turn creates a monopolistic environment whereby the employees are given free reign to basically dictate their terms of employment. Hence we create this outrageous disparity, and no one has the guts to stand up and say this is wrong.
Wayne Baker,
Wellington North