Vermont Business Magazine The Campaign for Vermont (CFV) has released a new report that compares the wages and benefits of teachers and state employees to the private sector and what that means for the current discussions around pension reform.
“As a former Commissioner of the Department of Labor and Commissioner of Human Resources, I was surprised by what we found in this report,” said CFV President Pat McDonald, “I think everyone needs to read this report because there were a number of assumptions that were carried through the years that were just plain wrong.”
The report found, among other things, that public employees make around $12,000 more per year in wages alone than the average private sector employee (this gap grows further when benefits are considered). In retirement, this number jumps to over $20,000 per year.
The average public employee in Vermont also earns right at the 75th percentile for all wage earners in the state. This means, on average, they are in the top 25% of income earners before benefits are considered.
“The goal is to better inform the public and policy makers about the reality around compensation for our public employees,” said Ben Kinsley, one of the lead researchers on the project. “There is a perception that state employees and teachers are underpaid and that we must offer extremely competitive benefits in order to compensate for this. In reality, the data doesn’t appear to back this up.” he concluded.
The organization hopes the pension task force, which is preparing to make recommendations to the legislature, will review this information and ask appropriate questions about the total compensation of public employees as they receive push back on making critical changes to pension benefits.
“We have always said we need to value or public employees,” said McDonald, “we should not break promises, but to do this we also need to make changes that safeguard the long-term stability of our pension funds. I think what we have learned here is that going forward we maybe don’t need to be quite as generous as we thought we did to compete with the private sector.”
Teacher Wages
Vermont Teachers enjoy salaries that are right at the national average ($61,730 vs $61,027) and are 16th highest in the country. Vermont teachers lead states like Hawaii, New Hampshire, and Maine when it comes to compensating our teachers.
While it is perhaps a poor indication of workload, Vermont schools also have the lowest student teacher ratios in the nation at 10.5:1. California, for example, has 23:1.1 Earnings vary quite a bit across different school districts with South Burlington capturing the highest salaries while smaller school districts in the center of the state are much more constrained.
Comparing averages for teachers become difficult because of this variation but we face similar challenges in the private sector with wages for the same occupation varying by region.
The full report can be found at CampaignForVermont.org/Public_Employees
Source: Montpelier, VT – The Campaign for Vermont 11.3.2021