The Chron’s Matier and Ross celebrated May Day early by running a piece on all of those overpaid city workers who are hauling in hundreds of thousands of dollars. And indeed, it sounds shocking: Nathaniel Ford, who was ousted from his job as the head of Muni, walked away with $567,000. That’s worse than Arlene Ackerman, who screwed up the public schools and got a $375,000 golden parachute. (Actually, the bulk of Ford’s payout was approved last summer, so it’s not really new information.)
Still: The $500K Club and all of the $200K-and-up people makes it appear that the city is just pouring the taxpayers’ hard-earned cash down the maw of those greedy public-sector workers (some of whom just happen to be in contract talks).
Imagine:
The average pay for all city workers was $93,229, plus benefits. According to the city controller, the average wage earner in the city’s private sector, on the other hand, made about $78,228.
Enough to make the average private-sector person, who lacks retirement benefits, angry at the apparent largesse.
But let’s put this in perspective.
The vast majority of the highly-paid city employees are either people with advanced degrees and skills (doctors and lawyers) who would make even more in the private sector, or people in the management ranks, or — most notably — people in the public-safety sector.
Cops and firefighters in the city make a lot of money. More than their counterparts in much of the rest of the nation. Yes, those are tough jobs, and yes, they deserve to be well paid, but should every retired chief and command-staff-level cop walk away with a pension and benefits of close to $200,000 a year, for life? That’s a fair question.
Take out the cops, firefighters, doctors, lawyers and top-dollar department heads, who get special employment contracts that nobody else gets, and you have a very different picture.
The average member of SEIU 1021 who works for the City and County of San Francisco earns $50,400 a year. That’s average — and since SEIU represents some high-skilled workers who make considerably more than that, quite a few of the city workers make less. It’s decent pay compared to a lot of nonprofit and some private-sector jobs, but for a unionized staff in an expensive city — a staff that’s taken pay cuts and furloughs for the past few years — it hardly seems excessive.
I realize how sexy these “bloated city worker salary” stories are — the Chron loves to put this stuff on the front page — but it would be nice if Matier and Ross gave a more accurate picture.