You could probably make some amazing visualizations of this data.
In Sweden, all the tax records are public information. You can literally look up how much your neighbor makes in a year. So each year after tax season, the tabloids all print up huge lists of "the richest people in YOUR neighborhood!". I've always been disappointed that with all this data, they've never gone beyond that and visualized the data geographically.
On the whole, I'd say privacy is valued similar. It's just a small quirk. Same how Americans tolerate banks having a secret-sauce shared credit validation system with god knows what information they sell back and forth.
If you were Swedish you might not consider it private information. Being from the US I do, but I don't consider my age private. It's difficult to say where a culture should draw the line, in an objective way.
UNHCR # 12 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
As well as my rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"
No valid reason exists for individual salary's to be posted just as with the blackmail scam with mugshots proves.
Partially, yes. Like all employment, when you take a job you give up part of your rights. When you take a job as a public servant you give up more than you would if you took a private sector job. This includes some human rights. The most obvious one is the right to do whatever you damn well please all the time, but there's various others. As a public servant you, for one thing, lose the right to practice your religion during the time you work, which is not something you lose in the private sector (this is because the government, and thus it's employees, cannot be allowed to be anything but neutral in matters of religion).
Read the contract you signed when you took a job. I bet it'll be entertaining and instructive. Don't take anything I say, or indeed the contract you signed, as legal advice.
You do however, retain the right to terminate your employment (no matter what the contract says, and it must be free to do so, provided a certain period of notice is respected), and get back full enjoyment of your rights.
Given that the government already knows, and either your employer or your accountant knows, and your bank has a pretty good idea, why do you think your income is to any meaningful extent still private?
You ever listen to a friend, who has recently hit a rough patch, talking about their difficulty paying their bills and think "gee, this would be a rather inappropriate time to mention how much money I make."?
That is where the desire for wage privacy comes from for me. Talking about how much you make, outside the workplace, has no benefits. It is just going to make the conversation awkward, or somebody is going to feel bad about themselves, or somebody is going to get an irritating spark of envy where none needed to exist. As far as I am concerned, you may as well publicize dick length.
(Public employees opt-in to the public knowing how much they make. The reason the public gets to know in that case is because the public is paying that salary. There is an employee/employer relationship there.)
I think public employees to the public knowing how much a particular job/role at a particular location on the salary ladder at a particular agency. But unless they share their particular role/ladder location with friends, I don't think they are opting into sharing their exact salary; only their salary range.
The people that I know who work for the federal government simply say "I'm a mathematician at NASA", not "I'm a GS-13, Step 4 mathematician and BTW, I got a bonus of X last year."
Note my emphasis in this snippet of my comment: "Talking about how much you make, outside the workplace,..."
Discussing wages with your employers/colleagues has advantages, and without it collective bargaining is difficult to impossible. However coworkers account for a slight fraction of those that most people interact with.
There is no utility in me (someone who works in tech) telling my brother (who works in aerospace) how much I make, and vice versa.
Personally, I wouldn't want it shared with the world. The people/organizations you have listed are somewhat trusted entities.
Income data can be used for a slew of criminal activity. I wonder if you can correlate the release of the data with burglaries or other crimes spiking in the relatively wealthier households, compared to their neighbors.
It's a risk but it seems likely to only be a problem in places where there are significant variations in income: if you live in a neighborhood where the average house costs $500K, your hypothetical burglar is going to assume that they're all good targets – or they'll just go to the house with a Mercedes in the driveway.
Your neighbor knows how much you make? Everyone you've listed has a need to know, that doesn't mean that everyone has a need to know.
Your doctor knows, your parents know and your insurance company probably knows, but does that mean you broadcast to the world that you have a third testicle?
a side note: It is generally accepted that the US government pays the highest salaries compared to other government agencies worldwide. This is the reason why the U.N. uses the US government scales and pays as their base (highest salaries of all member states) - of course before they put their "gravy" on it and more than double it.
My understanding is that US government salaries are high because the US private sector pays so well for comparable positions. The US is in the peculiar business of competing with itself, in a sense, or at least with its own economic model.
Private vs. public isn't such a teeth-gnashing, nail-biting dilemma for many other countries, who generally seem to do a better job of mentally separating the two sectors. The general agreement in other countries is that public = stable job, lower pay, higher "public service" calling; private = higher salary, less stability, etc.
Of course, this isn't taking into account countries like China -- where a government position is the best route into cushy, lucrative gigs in the private sector, and in fact, that's often the entire point. (To some degree, this is also the case in the US, at least at the higher levels of public service.) But I digress.
I think the same public/private comparisons for salary, stability, etc. apply in the U.S., at least for some job categories. It's just that, as you said, the private sector pays so well for comparable positions. Salary-wise, I think less skilled position do better with government, but the higher-skilled positions do better in the private sector. If you see a government engineer/scientist/mathematician working alongside a contractor in the same role, the government employee almost always makes less.
yes, that's on top of the so called post adjustment that for e.g. Geneva (last time I looked) was around 96% (base salary + post adjustment = net salary (+ normal tax rate) -> gross salary in the private sector (30 working days holidays p.a., up to 70% pension levels (17years contribution) with 5 years+ contributions getting you a pension, for senior staff add no VAT, 50% lower petrol prices, real tax & duty free shopping everyday - about half or less your airport shop, etc etc etc)
...and as salaries are normally paid besides tax free also tax equalized (the US is demanding income taxes from all citizens wherever they live including UN staff - the UN covers these taxes for US citizens and a handful other countries) the US pays itself back (via income tax) a nice discount of certainly 10% of its contributions to the UN.
soon, but not yet... this just went live last night :)
clarification edit: this is the end result of a new feature that allows enigma users to publicly share a frozen table state (up to 10 pages), which takes into place the current filter/sort state
The confound is that senior federal positions tend to be skewed more towards mid-to-late career due to the push over the last decade or two to hire contractors instead of staff. I don't believe there's any public information available which would help you distinguish that.
[name removed]
DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH SERVICE
LIBRARIAN
Maryland
Prince George's County
BELTSVILLE
GS 14
119238
I know the GS schedule is based on how long you work as opposed to how well you work, but i didn't think that non-STEM or non-Management roles made above GS11 or 12.
There are two components to GS, grade and step. Step is based on time, grade is based on position. It's also possible that this person came out as a GS-14 rather than a lower GS-12 or GS-13 due to the attempt at merit based pay (NSPS) that was canceled 3 (4?) years back. Their pay may have been improved via merit increases under NSPS and GS-14 might have been the closest equivalent to their pay or they could have been miscoded as a GS-14 equivalent and it wasn't corrected. Most of these were left as-is rather than fighting to "demote" them to avoid the hassle. Especially since most of them would be retiring within 5 years or so, or would have been promoted to that same level in the near future. Rather than demote them they just won't get the promotion just a lateral move.
GS grades tend to correspond to scope of work, degree of education required and scope of responsibilities. If the work doesn't require a college degree, don't expect anything above GS-9, and probably no better than GS-7. If it's "business ops" that requires a degree but has limited responsibilities you might be a GS-11, engineers are (after their "apprenticeship" period) between GS-11 and GS-13 (essentially, education + depth of knowledge, most GS-13 engineers will be SMEs, subject matter experts). Supervisors will typically be one grade above those they supervise, maybe on par with SMEs, with a typical minimum grade of GS-11. So a supervisor in charge of 40 engineers might be a GS-13, their boss would be a GS-14 and that persons boss a GS-15.
Unless you're talking about a public library catering to homeless people and children, a "librarian" is typically an educated professional, usually with an advanced degree, who has enough subject matter expertise to efficiently help researchers find relevant materials.
Indeed! Librarians are often very highly educated, the couple I know have masters degrees. If you need something, no matter how obscure, you can ask a librarian, they will know how to get it for you.
I was disagreeing that public libraries cater to only the lowly forms of society (homeless and children) and don't require educated librarians. They do more than babysit and they employ such librarians. They also employ, for example, teenagers to stock shelves.
interestingly enough i know a few people with masters in library science - though, they studied how to organize and present information as opposed to holding a subject matter expertise (in this case agriculture)
I think you're making a mistake in assuming librarians aren't comparable to STEM work. That's a reasonable position for someone with a masters degree who's studied a lot of information theory, subject area expertise, and in many cases non-trivial technical skills to help process, remediate, etc. data on a large scale.
At a research library – and if, as it appears, this is http://www.nal.usda.gov/ it's one of a small number of major national libraries – it's common for librarians to provide expert advice. It's not “Get me [ISBN]” so much as “I'm looking for information on a topic. Can you find good sources?”
GS isn't based entirely on how long you work. Most positions have a cap. There are also plenty of places that generally don't promote people because the management sucks or they don't have funding. There are also ways to prevent substandard employees from getting promoted.
Perhaps the term librarian means something other than what we think it does, like the librarian of congress. Perhaps its a supervisor at an enormous library. I really hope we aren't paying 90k+ for someone to check out books about farming.
Keep in mind, it's also not uncommon for those in charge of others to have the same title. That is, in an engineering office the one in charge of a group of 1k engineers is likely an engineer as well, so they'd be a GS-14 or GS-15 electrical engineer. So the person who rose through the ranks of librarians from the lowest level to being in charge of a group of librarians would similarly be a GS-13 or GS-14 librarian.
I would assume they help keep track of / index the massive amount of government-sponsored agricultural research & data the DoA has generated. "[The Agricultural Research Service] has more than 2,200 permanent scientists working on approximately 1,100 research projects at more than 100 locations", to say nothing of historical data.
Great UI, love it. Didn't realize how many cushy jobs the government has...damn. Now I know why my parents kept telling me to look in the public sector first and foremost.
Most of the people who are making 100-200k would make at the very least double that if they were in the private sector. A GS-15 is equivalent to a Brigadier General(Who would be in charge of thousands of people). Now, keep in mind that some technology positions have inflated GS ranks because it was the only way they could get the salaries high enough to attract talent. Security analysts and programmers don't come cheap.
Working for the government can be great, depending on who you work for and whether or not it fits your personality, but don't be deluded into thinking that the majority of government employees have cushy, high paying jobs.
Note: Politicians and Senior Executive Service employees are a different story, many of them are overpaid and ineffective at their jobs.
Paywise they're peers to Colonels and Brigadier Generals, position scope tends towards being equivalent to Colonel (AF, can't speak to other services or departments), with SES employees being the civil service peers to General officers.
Absolutely, and the comparisons get kind of hairy sometimes. GS-12+ aren't all supervisory, it's possible to have GS-14 and 15s that are mostly specialists with few or no individuals in their direct charge. For those curious, the general mapping of GS grades to officer ranks:
GS-15 = O-6 (Colonel/Navy Captain)
GS-14 = O-5 (Lt Colonel/Commander)
GS-13 = O-4 (Major)
GS-12 = O-3 (Captain, this is the journeyman level for engineesr)
GS-9/11 = O-1/2 (Lt's, apprentice stage)
GS doesn't start at 9, though. The lower grades are typically limited scope, no supervisory responsibility, office jobs (secretaries, mail room, clerk, data entry, etc.). Or they're training positions, straight out of college an engineer may be a GS-5/7 and after 2-4 years a GS-11/12. They don't really have a clean comparison to military ranks, that I know of.
It gets fuzzy. Enlisted responsibility is not strictly below officer responsibility, it's just different and somewhat overlapping once you get to higher NCO ranks. A high ranked NCO could be on par with a GS-12 in terms of responsibility scope, though perhaps not in pay. I'd agree that low GS grades (say 5-9) are probably akin to E1-E4, but starting at E5 or so (AF) you start gaining responsibilities (either personnel or materiel) that are more akin, not in kind but in scope, to lower ranked officers.
I disagree. I worked with plenty of AF Col's in the 5-sided-puzzle-palace that managed offices with 15-30 folks.
They worked alongside a GS-13 to GS-15 types.
What happens in D.C. isn't really representative of the rest of the military. A normal Colonel will be a Brigade Commander, in charge of at least 3 battalions, which each contain hundreds of people.
Well it simply depends on the scenario of the given agency/unit. In the Navy an O-6 may very well have a "Major" command that still doesn't involve more than 180 people and an individual ship.
Likewise just as D.C. has peculiar effects on the military rank of typical workers, so does it have peculiar effects on the civilian grade of workers, due to the position classification principle of "scope of effect".
I'm less familiar with the Navy than I am with the Army and the Marines, but wouldn't the captain of a ship with a crew of 180 warrant a sizable paycheck in the private sector? I began by talking about the number of personnel they would be responsible for, but someone else described the situation a bit better than I. AS they said, it really comes down to the level of responsibility. The government probably determined that being the captain of a ship worth tens of millions of dollars is probably roughly equivalent to leading a brigade of infantrymen.
But the Navy normally uses O5 to command ships of similar crew size. Very rarely, even O4... it all depends on what exactly the ship is, and what the expected mission set of that ship is.
Obviously the Navy wouldn't slot a random O4 into minesweeper command even though it's a small ship, so you're really talking about a "better than average" O4 even for those, it just reflects back to how scope of responsibility can change things even for the Navy.
This is where it starts breaking down though, as rank increases (GS or other) responsibility increases. This is often most clearly seen with the number of people you're charged with, but less clearly is when it's the work itself. Either as a specialist or leading a group of specialists, or managing particularly big projects (so you don't directly manage thousands, but the scope of the project may place you indirectly in charge of them).
Colonels at the Pentagon are a dime a dozen. But a Colonel in the field - away from DC - might be a base commander. When I was a civilian working for the military and participating in/attending meetings, briefings, etc., we didn't even stand for Generals entering the room (which is protocol) unless the General had at least 2 stars. . .and not always then, depending on the level of the brass in the room.
> Most of the people who are making 100-200k would make at the very least double that if they were in the private sector.
The base salary would double. However they'd be left without a pension, and other benefits though I think the pension is easily the largest monetary value.
OPM estimates that FERS pension and retiree health benefits add 18% to overall pay.
Let's use as an example someone with 20 years of federal service and a highest 3 years salary of $150k. The FERS benefit is roughly 1.1% * 20 * 150k = $33k/year. That's a 25-year annuity of $450k. To accumulate $450k over 20 years, that's about $12k per year, or 8% of income. People who serve longer will get a bigger pension, but the nature of the $100k+ positions in the federal government is that they require advanced degrees, extensive work experience in the private sector, etc, which limits the overall length of service.
If you're an educated professional (say an antitrust economist at the DOJ), you'll make a lot less money in federal service even accounting for benefits. On the other hand, if you're a document clerk, you'll make a lot more.
The government has significantly _lower_ turnover than the private sector, which isn't what microeconomics says we would see if the workers could make that much more by leaving. It's more consistent with the suggestion that the workers would make considerably less if they left.
So:
1. Microeconomics is seriously, perhaps completely, wrong; or,
2. Federal employees are much more motivated by non-financial rewards, such as the satisfaction of public service, than the rest of us, and are, therefore, better people than the rest of us; or,
3. They couldn't make more in the private sector, and would probably make less.
The three options you listed don't even begin to describe the multitude of reasons that a person might choose to work for the government.
There are people who enjoy public service, that doesn't make them better or worse than the rest of us. I served in the Army for almost a decade, it doesn't mean I'm better than anyone.
The "can't make it in the private sector" argument is ridiculous. Everyone who has ever worked at a sizable organization, both for the government and in the private sector, has known someone that was completely incompetent yet still remained employed. Sometimes people just slip through the cracks, it doesn't matter where you are. What's funny is that on one hand we have civilians saying that federal employees couldn't make it on the outside, and on the other side whenever someone gets out of the military, there will be those who say its because that person "couldn't cut it." It's childish and counterproductive nearly all of the time.
Two reasons that come to mind that you haven't mentioned are free travel and a stable employment situation. Right now things are kind of screwed up, but generally speaking, government jobs are stable. You might have to move, but at least you know that you'll have a job unless you give them a good reason to let you go.
One of the smartest people I know has been a software engineer for about 5-7 years, he gets treated like crap at his private sector company, and makes well below market value. I honestly have no idea why he stays at his company, but I do know enough to realize that I won't be able to explain it with a mathematical model.
First, these models are looking at individuals' behavior on average.
Second, if you want to be an infantryman, fly a jet, work with missiles, etc, most of the jobs are military. And there are subcultures found only in the military that some people find very appealing. The models are smart enough to consider such factors.
But the motivations and cultures of the military and civilian employment writ large are VASTLY different. Lumping the civilians in with the military and declaring it all good is way too simple. There are huge chunks of the government where the work is really no different than similar work in the private sector.
The postal service and UPS is only one example -- there are some unique functions and activities in USPS, out in rural areas, but the vast majority of it is pretty much the same as USPS. Wanna bet that postal workers are paid more than USPS workers? Or on their turnover ratios?
It isn't too hard to see the best parts of the government, they're pretty interesting and do important stuff. But those parts make a surprisingly small fraction of the total activity.
#2 is a strong factor – it's not even better people so much as different motivations. If you believe strongly in, say, open data most of the jobs are in the public sector. If you like working with public domain data, again, there are only so many places where that happens.
There are also other, less appreciated aspects: e.g. federal employees work is in the public domain by default which means a lot of people can work on open-source software without fighting corporate culture:
The number of jobs where that's true is a small subset of the number of jobs which pay more in the private sector.
The other big factor you're missing is the stability: if you have a family, disabilities or health problems, etc. something like the startup scene is a lot less appealing compared to a job where there are legal mandates against death-march project management. Given the skew towards mid-to-senior level positions, I'm also sure that a lot of people saw the appeal of an employer which has strict rules against age discrimination, too.
This is not to say that they couldn't make more money but that they're making tradeoffs for the likely future value based on their personal risk exposure. Arguably #1 is true but really it's irrelevant because anything as complicated as your career seems outside of the scope of microeconomics.
Do those salary numbers include the benefits like retirement? Public jobs are one of the few pension gigs left. Also their health insurance is pretty good.
The health insurance is actually pretty bad and really expensive. The pension isn't that cushy either. They changed the pension system in the mid-80s, but people still spout off the false notion that you're somehow set on a government pension.
My understanding is that the health insurance is still better than what is typically available for private sector employees. The pension system is not nearly as good as it used to be, true, but it does exist, which is not true for most private sector employees.
I've worked both sides of the fence, so I'm not flinging arrows.
also include in your exception list, political appointees. I haven't scanned the whole list so I am wondering if the members of the Whitehouse staff, Congress, and similar, are available? The Whitehouse has nearly 500 listed on their site.
The sheer number of government employees is amazing especially when you consider you have to add on top of these numbers those at state, city, and local, levels.
I'm not a government employee, directly, but I am a contractor that has been furloughed for two weeks now, and I'm happier than I've been in a long while. And no, I won't get back pay; the first two weeks were "administrative leave", which I have to make up (typically with vacation time), and starting this week the charge code is leave without pay.
Workers who have been furloughed will only be paid back if Congress explicitly passes a bill to pay them. That has happened in previous shutdowns but it is not certain to happen this time.
For what it's worth, back pay is apparently part of the package in the Senate today. The House already passed legislation guaranteeing it, but for whatever reason (this article suggests Senate Republicans, but I don't know) it didn't get through the Senate.
They only get paid if Congress specifically includes language paying them. People are merely assuming congress will do so on what, good faith? Given the nature of this whole bruhaha, I wouldn't discount entirely the possibility of no back-pay.
The Senate didn't pass it. However, since both houses are passing the same thing but at different times or as part of different packages, it's all but certain that when the time comes back pay will happen.
There is no guarantee they will be paid! If they will, it will have to be specifically specified in the new budget. Why does everyone act like it is a given?
With a backlog of work to do once you return. Its not like an office or factory suspending operations because there is no work. Many of these people have deadlines that they won't be able to meet without a great deal of effort and likely overtime (if granted). So not only does this shutdown give them a "paid vacation" it's going to pay extra so that the work can still get done close to on time.
… and don't forget the politically charged atmosphere. You're still going to hear about how government agencies don't work but most of the attackers won't mention things like e.g. the way the VA was making progress on their backlog until October 1st:
This is really awesome. The UI/UX feels a little unapproachable and the feature set seems lacking (what do I do when I get to that page) , but I'm sure it's infinitely better than the alternative.
Maybe I've lost something in all the details, how is this list compiled?
I was born in DC and grew up in the area, as such I know a lot of current federal employees who should be on a 2012 list. I grepped for a handful of names of folks I know personally and so far found only one. (For privacy reasons I will not share the names of non-matches here.)
Update: Ok, I've found two now. Still many more non-matches than matches.
...obtained by Asbury Park Press via a FOIA. It doesn’t include FBI, CIA, Defense Department, or IRS employees, or employees involved in security work, nuclear materials or national security matters.
Nope. BNL is a ~30 minute drive from Islip. BNL is sandwiched between Ridge/Middle Island, Yaphank, and Shorham Wading River (10 minutes from where the aborted SWR nuclear power plant rests). BNL belongs to the township of Brookhaven.
Meanwhile, Islip is the home of McCarthur Airport, a medium sized airport that serves the east end of Long Island.
The link goes straight to at least ten pages of positions with USDA which is located in Beltsville, about 10 miles outside of DC. Bethesda and Rockville, both of which are in the top five, are other also DC suburbs. At a glance there are 300K+ positions in the DMV area, a significant percentage of the 1.3M listed.
Bethesda and Rockville are, for all practical purposes, "DC", as are Beltsville, Suitland, Arlington, VA, and a bunch of other locations that are listed in that data. Segmenting them out is like not considering MIT or Harvard as part of the college scene in Boston because they are in Cambridge, which is just being uselessly pedantic.
This data has obviously been public for a while. A site with Senate/House staff salaries makes the rounds every summer when a new round of Hill interns realize they can look up how much their friends and bosses make.
In Sweden, all the tax records are public information. You can literally look up how much your neighbor makes in a year. So each year after tax season, the tabloids all print up huge lists of "the richest people in YOUR neighborhood!". I've always been disappointed that with all this data, they've never gone beyond that and visualized the data geographically.