On Wed, Mar 11, 1998 at 10:31:09AM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:

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The Cato institute has done studies on comparative remuneration which shows approximately double the salaries, accompanied by vastly more security and power.

At the bottom end, bus drivers and prison guards, this is strikingly obvious. A muni bus driver makes about as much as senior engineer in Silicon valley.

At the risk of an irrelevant and stupid digression from the topic of the threat, Is this really true ? The technical people I know who work for the government seem to get salaries that would be low in industry for someone with that background. And I'd be surprised that bus drivers out in silicon valley were really making the $60-95K that ordinary senior engineers designing bus drivers make around here (the NE). If they are, they are getting lots more than other municipal employees such as school teachers with masters degrees. (In fact, I've heard that demand had recently driven salaries in the valley way up and maybe my numbers for engineers are low, especially for software engineers.) There is, of course, that nasty law that classifies engineers as exempt professionals but allows companies to treat them as just cannon fodder workers stuffed into cubicles and treated with little of the respect the term professional would suggest - to be forced to work large amounts of completely uncompensated overtime. Bus drivers (non exempt) do get paid for every minute they are on the job, and many times work schedules are deliberately arranged to guarantee significant amounts of overtime at time and a half, so many bus drivers actually make a significant multiple of their nominal salary for the same hours engineers get base salary and no more. But I do think that Prof. Froomkin is right that a lot of top managers and legal types and others in government whose private sector equivalents get huge salaries do work at a considerable loss. Salaries for top of the heap government employees such as judges and managers of large departments with budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions rarely get more than $150K, whereas similar people would get much more in the private sector. Of course the job security differences are vast, and government workers are one of the very few classes of workers left in the economy who have any actual job security long term at all. -- Dave Emery N1PRE, die@die.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2 5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18