Public and Private Sector Compensation: What Is Affordable in This Recession and Beyond?—A Conference Summary (Special Issue)
For many years, conventional wisdom
has held that public sector wages were
lower than private sector wages, so generous
ancillary benefits were needed in
order to attract and retain skilled workers
in the public sector. More recently,
data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS) have suggested to some
observers that total compensation averages
of the public sector now significantly
exceed those of the private sector. Economic
pressures and global labor trends
have led many private sector firms to
eliminate expensive benefits, such as
defined benefit pension plans (in favor
of defined contribution plans), but
most public sector agencies have not
followed suit. Such changes have created
a greater perceived gap between public
sector and private sector employees in
terms of both financial security and
overall compensation.