What is the lifetime job security of government employees worth? And how can we take into account, in salary comparisons, the lesser pressure in the public sector than in the private sector to achieve results?
These very difficult questions are among the many comments I received about my column which reported on the poorer salary conditions of the Quebec government. The study cited in the column did not focus on health and education employees, primarily, but on others, often civil servants.
A few government employees thanked me for saying that they are not spoiled children, for having clearly explained that their pay is overall less than elsewhere by about 7%, all things taken into account. Others have misunderstood the effect of the pension plan, which I will tell you about later.
“Huge productivity gap”
Above all, readers reacted by pointing out the great differences in pressure between the private and the public.
“Having worked in the public and private sectors, the task, the pressure, the level of demands and the work involvement required in the private sector make the comparison unfair. Quite simply,” one of them wrote to me.
Two readers who have worked as executives in the public and private sectors make very harsh remarks towards the public. They do not want to be named or publicly identify the organizations they worked for so they can speak freely or not be prosecuted.
The first says he had 70 people in his charge, both private and public. “First, there is a huge difference in productivity between the public and private sectors. This gap hugely affected the ability of my department, when I first came to the public, to deliver predictably.
“Secondly, absences due to illness in the public sector (especially prolonged absences) are very much higher than in the private sector. This costs taxpayers significant amounts of money and also impacts productivity.
“That said, certain demands from workers are very justified, especially in health and education, but at the same time we should review the total functioning of our organizations, the sacrosanct power of the unions, as well as the ever-growing layer of executives high earners who don’t really get things done. »
Very hard, as I told you…
The other leader who testified, without knowing the first, told me essentially the same thing. The person, now retired, was a senior executive in the private sector then in a state company, outside of education and health.
There is a world between the two. To the public, never emergency, never pressure, a project was supposed to cost 2 million and it costs more than 10 in the end? No problem, no accountability, we have billions. There is no awareness of the value of money.
A retired person who was a senior executive in the private sector and in a state-owned company
“Plus, I’ve never seen so much so-called ‘burn-out’ and they last a very long time. I had the shock of my life when I went public,” this person wrote to me, who said he managed to get the job done by hiring executives from the private sector for his management committee.
Ouch…
Furthermore, many did not understand that the overall compensation comparisons from the Institut de la tourisme du Québec (ISQ) took into account the value of the Quebec government pension plan.
Essentially, the ITQ adds to the pay the invisible portion of the salary that the employer pays (approximately 22% of the salary) for employee social benefits. The pension plan alone represents approximately 7% of the 22% of these benefits, the rest being made up of insurance and legal employee contributions, in particular.
A private engineer reader tells me that this advantage is still underestimated by the unions. “It’s quite an effort to create your own retirement fund. Of course, I put the bonuses offered by the company into my RRSPs, among other things, but that counts for little if we compare to the pensions of certain public organizations,” he essentially explains to me.
My response to this?
Throughout their careers, government employees have contributed to their retirement fund an amount often equivalent to that of the government. These payments reduced their standard of living, but they benefit later.
Private sector workers should do the same, in their RRSP, by putting 12 to 18% of their pay per year, including the employer’s share, but they very often do not do this, preferring to spend the money to live in the present moment.
In other words, the funny advantage of the retirement plan is not only its addition to overall compensation, but the forced savings it constitutes.
To think about, all of this…
Readers’ comments have been edited for the sake of synthesis and cohesion.