The Governments Division of the U.S. Census Bureau has released March 2006 state and local government public employment and payroll data for the United States and the states. I have downloaded this information, have done some calculations to make the data comparable, and have included relevant private-sector data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and New York State and New Jersey Departments of Labor. The results are in the attached spreadsheet, on the two pages that print, and are directly relevant to the budget negotiations ongoing in Albany. Based on what I see there, if I had to choose I've vote for the Governor's budget rather than that passed by the Assembly or State Senate.
The data show that hospital employment, both public and private, is far above the U.S. average per 100,000 people in New York City. Yet the State Senate and Assembly believe the hospitals require more funds to provide adequate health care. Public school employment is similarly far above average in the rest of the state. Yet the State Senate believes New York City should continue to get an unfairly low share of total education funding, including back-door “tax relief” school aid. These are longstanding conditions. One positive change is that the gap between New York City’s public school employment and pay (adjusted for the cost of living) and the national average (if not the rest of the state) is much smaller than it once was. In fact, even though New York City’s children face large class sizes, the city has 8.9 enrolled schoolchildren per instructional employee, below the national average of 10.4. Yet the Assembly agrees with the teacher’s union that the city should be forced to hire more dues-paying teachers in order to get class sizes down.
Before going into the details on the results, some background on the data. Every five years, most recently in 2002, the U.S. Census Bureau conducts a Census of Governments, which allows data to be compiled on the employment, payroll, revenues, expenditures and debts of all the local governments, added together, in each county in the country. Because this data includes everything – municipalities, counties, school districts, special districts – it can be directly compared with New York City, which is all of the above. In non-census years, the Bureau conducts a survey of local governments, and provides estimates for all local governments in each state and the United States. That is what this data is – finance data for 2005 will probably arrive in August. Individual unit data for the City of New York and Port Authority is always included, and this allows me to create data for New York City, and thus for the rest of the New York State by subtraction. (The Office of the State Comptroller could match the Governments Division and provide comparable data for every county in the state every year if it chose.)
To make the data comparable, additional adjustments are required. I divide full time equivalent employment by population to get the number of local government employees in each category per 100,000 residents. The government sometimes acts through the public sector (by paying for private health care via Medicaid for example), and some private industries substitute for public employment. For example, New York City has 582 Transit employees per 100,000 residents, far above the national average of 76, but that is because New York City has a lot of transit. On the other hand, the city has only 452 employees per 100,000 residents in industries related to the private automobile, compared with a national average of 1,382. What New Yorkers must pay, in taxes and fares, to support all those transit workers is offset through the ownership and use of fewer private cars. As we shall see, however, that isn’t true in the hospitals industry. Overall, New York City had 5,134 full time equivalent local government employees per 100,000 residents in March 2006, compared with a national average of 3,997, with 4,834 in the rest of New York State, and with 4,384 in New Jersey. When considering the average for the rest of New York State, recall that parts of the state do not have public water, public sewer, public trash collection, and professional fire departments.
I’ve have also calculated the percent more or less than the national average each category of public employee was paid in March 2006. These figures are not really comparable unless one considers the higher cost of living in Downstate New York. In the second quarter of 2006 (I avoided the first quarter to avoid exaggerating the effect of bonuses), the average private sector worker in Downstate New York earned 43.6% more than the national average; the figure is 27.8% if the high-paid Finance and Insurance sector is excluded. For full years, I generally find that the average private sector worker Downstate earns about one-third more than the national average, and similarly the average local government employee in New York City earned 30.1% more than the average local government employee in the nation in March 2006. In New Jersey, the average private sector worker earned 21.4% more than the national average while the average local government worker earned 24.2% more than the national average. Because the annual data does not allow a separation of low-cost Upstate from the high-cost Downstate Suburbs, payroll data for the rest of the state is not that useful in non-census years. To see how the Downstate Suburbs, Upstate Metro Areas, and the Rest of the State fared in 2002, download the spreadsheet attached to this http://www.r8ny.com/blog/larry_littlefield/local_government_employment_in_2002_census_bureau_data.html post and print.
I’ll write a few posts on this data, but let’s get to the results relevant to the state budget.
In March 2006, New York City had 488 public hospital workers per 100,000 residents, far above the national average of 177. It also had 1,914 private hospital workers per 100,000 residents, also far above the national average of 1,452. The rest of New York State and New Jersey were also above average in private hospital employment, but this was more than balanced by limited public hospital employment. New York City’s private hospital workers earned 30.2% more than the national average, or about what one might expect, although many hospitals elsewhere in the country are for-profit entities while in New York City all are non-profit charities with an obligation to serve the poor. Meanwhile, in New York City’s public hospitals, which actually do serve the poor, local government employees earned just 13.7% more than the national average.
Local governments in the portion of New York State outside New York City had 2,819 elementary and secondary school workers per 100,000 residents, far above the national average of 2,220 and above the average of 2,607 in New Jersey. Instructional employment in the rest of the state totaled 1,881 per 100,000 residents compared with the national average of 1,542; that is 8.5 enrolled students per instructional employee in the Rest of New York State compared with a national average of 10.4. The figure was 8.9 in New York City and 8.0 in now-broke New Jersey (where public school employment had been much lower a decade ago). Where the rest of New York State really stands out is in non-instructional employment, with 938 local government workers per 100,000 residents compared with a national average of 678, just 651 in New Jersey, and just 382 in New York City. And while payroll comparisons are hard to make, instructional employees in the rest of New York State, the majority of whom were in low-cost Upstate New York, earned more on average than those in New York City, who face harder-to-teach children and a higher cost of living.
Still, staffing and pay levels are much better for New York City schools than they were a decade ago. The city certainly needs some additional teachers, given its extensive troubled and non-English speaking student population, but with the ratio of students to instructional employment now well below the national average, one can see why while I’m in favor of lower class sizes I’m against hiring more teachers to get it. New York City had 1,444 instructional employees per 100,000 residents in March 2006, below the national average of 1,542, but the city also had relatively few public school children per 100,000 residents, because the city’s schools drive many children to private schools or out of the city entirely. In the second quarter of 2005, the city had 409 private elementary and secondary school teachers per 100,000 residents, compared with a national average of 199.
Rather than hire more teachers, New York City should continue paying more to the teachers it has. The city’s instructional employees earned 20.6% more than the national average in March 2006, not the approximately one-third more that private sector workers get here. But this is a huge improvement over the past, an improvement that not all relatively underpaid categories of NYC public employees have made (more on that later). In March 2005, for example, NYC’s public school instructional employees were paid just 12.8% more than the national average – in prior years they had barely matched that average here in high-cost New York. Moreover, with more New York City students receiving additional instruction the summer, the city’s teachers have an opportunity to earn even more relative to the national average on an annual basis, albeit at the cost of working more of a full-time job. But instructional employees in the Downstate Suburbs, in New Jersey, and perhaps even in low cost Upstate New York earn more than New York City’s instructional employees (the latter was true in 2002).
New York City also had above average private employment per 100,000 residents in the Ambulatory Health Care and Social Assistance industries. As can be seen in the more detailed annual data attached to this post http://www.r8ny.com/blog/larry_littlefield/what_are_all_those_people_doing.html, a relatively high number of home health care and personal care aides for the elderly are responsible for that difference, with the city’s employment in other types of ambulatory health care below average. And, although private employment in the overall Nursing and Residential Care Facilities is below average overall in New York City, it is above average in the Nursing Care Facility industry – despite all those additional at-home aides. Governor Spitzer has already backed off any attempt to reign in excesses here between his preliminary and final budgets. As I’ve shown, with so many seniors receiving at-home care here compared with elsewhere, those aides are costly to the public — despite being underpaid.
Still, Governor Spitzer’s budget did make an attempt to address some of the other disparities demonstrated by this data. I didn’t think he went too far. I thought he didn’t go far enough. The Assembly proposals are not as good. The State Senate budget, though an improvement in that its members are actually on the record with a voted-for budget, is otherwise three-plus steps in the wrong direction – away from the national average without justification.