Moonbox

It's not their average salary, but it's the average cost of their compensation with their benefits included. Those numbers are from the PBO, not my head, so I suggest you take them up with his office.

With that type of brain-dead logic we might as well pay the average public servant $300,000/year, because then we'd get even BETTER workers and every single extra dollar spent would be well worth it in increased productivity. The same logic works for your lowly burger-flippers. A $30/hr burger flipper would make THREE TIMES as many burgers (or burgers that were 3x as delicious) right? Yep, your theory is TOTALLY sound! Nice try. The 13 year increase from 1999-2012 was 5.1 annually, or 2.1% higher than inflation. Only going back to 2002 might give you a slightly better number to quote us, but that's just being selective with your data points. As for 'making up' for wage freezes, the math doesn't support that conclusion, nor does the PBO. Six years of wage freezes in the 1991-1997 period (at ~2% average inflation) would have been more than made up for by 2005. Any increases beyond that were pure gravy. All of this ignores the fact, however, that the original wage freezes in the 90's were a result of out of control public spending in the first place. Poor dears! It seems you've forgotten already how it was an average of 5.1% for 13 years up until 2012...also that the average compensation is $114,000/year. That's SO tough! The average Scandinavian doesn't earn $114,000/year like the average Canadian federal public servant does. I can tell you conclusively that they don't earn anything even CLOSE. Sorry to abbreviate that large and mostly useless wall of text but I wanted to take this point from it and do a little exercise in logic with you, using numbers we have and statements you've made throughout this thread: 1) The AVERAGE federal public servant earns $114,000/year in compensation according to the PBO. 2) The vast majority of public servants, according to you, are clerks, administrators, junior program officers and low-level management. 3) The federal public service, underpays its high-level and technically experienced staff. If the above is true (and it's coming from your own mouth and/or the PBO), then our average public servant makes $114,000/year and the vast majority of them are clerks, administrators, junior program officers and low-level management. What's more is that since the senior staff is underpaid, we can also conclude that this is NOT a matter of the top earners skewing the averages upwards like we see in the private sector. That brings us to the pretty safe conclusion that the average public servant is grossly overpaid. Thank you for proving my point for me.

While I'm largely against organized gambling, I do participate enthusiastically in fantasy sports leagues. These are generally things, usually among friends, and a $100 entry into the league would be considered expensive.

It maybe didn't make it worse, but it's generally hard to find compelling evidence showing a casino reviving a local economy.Niagara Falls is no exception. First off, the appeal of horse racing is extremely limited. The VAST majority of sports enthusiasts don't know a thing or care a smidge for horse racing. If not for gambling the sport would hardly even exist. As for professional sports, all I think this leads to is dumb sports enthusiasts overconfident in their knowledge losing more than they can't afford. You're generally not able to make $1000+ dollar bets on Proline or with your friends, but who knows what you can drop on a single game if it sports betting is legalized. The compulsive and addictive nature of gambling is a perfectly horrible ingredient to combine with the emotional and unreasonable experience of being a sports fan. Combine this with the aforementioned risk of game-fixing (which used to happen all of the time prior to these laws being introduced), and it becomes very difficult for anyone to convince me that this would provide any net benefit to the economy or well-being of Canadians. Casinos are generally not value-adding contributors to local economies. Unless it's a huge tourist attraction (like Vegas) and brings people from all over, they suck out just as much, if not more, than they ever bring in. At best, gambling is a sin/vice tax that demographically tends to hit the most vulnerable and least educated the hardest.

I love going to Niagara Falls, and do so frequently. I'll be there all next weekend. That said, the casino is nothing but depressing, much like the town it touted it would revive but clearly failed to.

I couldn't manage high school econ? Good one! It's no surprise you haven't clued in by now what my undergrad and post-grad were. After you embarrassed yourself trying to apply standard economic theory to public sector unions (which, I promise you every ECON textbook in North America explains you can't do), your only defence since then has been to bluster incompetently and call me uneducated. Talk about selectively picking your facts! Not only did you completely misrepresent what it said (it merely stated expenses went down for the 1991-1998 time period), you also conveniently (and purposely) excluded the IMMEDIATELY following statement: Since then, however, the public service has more than made up for lost time and has reached new heights in terms of number of workers and compensation. Between 1999 and 2012, personnel costs per employee — or full-time equivalent using government terminology — rose by an average 5.1 per cent annually, more than twice the 2.1 per cent average annual inflation rate. So while you lament the tragic 1% pay increases federal public servants are earning this year, your self-absorbed idea of facts/history ignore that compensation increased by 5.1% annually (more than double inflation) for the THIRTEEN YEARS prior. You failed to explain how overpaying federal public servants ($114,000/year on average according to the PBO) helps the shrinking middle class that's paying for these compensation packages. Another unsurprising example of flimsy logic. The Nordic economic model doesn't succeed by overpaying its public servants. Indeed, it went to great lengths to reduce out of control entitlements in the 1990's and came out much better for it. The Nordic model succeeds due to an overall goal of promoting equality, workforce participation and opportunities for social mobility. Excessive public sector entitlements directly conflict with this. A really dumb red-herring. Nobody said high school drop-outs were earning $114,000/year in overall compensation in the public service. The question is rather why the average federal public servant (only ~50% of whom are even university educated), earns an average of $114,000 per year in compensation. Except for the all the stuff (most of it) that wasn't, like the PBO findings I linked/quoted above. This is yet another pathetic deflection to mask how your feeble arguments crumble around you. Rather than argue the actual facts being discussed (namely the $114,000/year total average compensation for federal public servants #'s published by the PBO), you've pathetically attacked the credibility of some unspecified 'information' I may have provided somewhere, at some time. What's especially funny, however, is that not only have you attempted a classic and particularly incompetent circumstantial ad hominem, the irony of your statement has clearly gone right over your head. You, who've been very liberal with your personal testimonials about working for the public service and how they somehow prove your point, are claiming my information is biased without even explaining what that information is! Personal testimonials though, THOSE are legit! No bias there!

I'm willing to believe that people are equally miserable working for the major banks and the government, but the government pays far, far more than the major banks do for the majority of their employees. People are more willing to work lousy jobs if they're getting paid a lot to do it, so voluntary turnover is limited. Additionally, the union makes it very difficult to terminate the bottom performers, who linger on earning automatic wage increases until they're able to retire with full pension. There's a lot to be said about the 'quirks' of working for a large organization. I imagine most of us can come up with a story about an incompetent and out of touch supervisor they've had in the past working for one. There are plenty of examples of large and well-run organizations with relatively happy employees, however, to dismiss the theory that they grow less efficient and employees get less happy the bigger things get. Where you generally see the worst and most complacent/inefficient organizations is where there is some sort protected market. The public sector unions have a monopoly on labour and thus inflate wages while doing little/nothing to promote service standards. On the same token, heavily regulated industries like banks and telecoms remove most of the competitiveness of the industry. The banks or Rogers/Bell/Telus can barely be called competitive, as they consistently earn fat profits and offer terrible value for their services, all while driving wages for their entry/mid level staff into the dirt. Service standards can be kept low by the weak and oligopolistic competitive market, so no steps need to be taken to maintain experienced low/mid-level staff or to increase value for customers.

Anyone who's been to Niagara Falls in the last decade can see that the casino has done little to revive the local economy. Outside of intersections closest to the actual Falls, the town is a disaster.

Most of us couldn't care less about a casino's ability to prosper. More than anything, they're just another way for the government to increase tax revenues and drain local pockets. Even the slightest risk of game-rigging would be all the justification I'd need to shut this bill down, as I don't believe for a second that casinos are positive for most local economies.

The colossal management failures of the major banks in the 2000-2008 years and the enormous write-offs they suffered as a result would suggest that most of them are not, in fact, better managed. The chronic and critical staff turnover rates they experience would also suggest that people are much more unhappy working there than in the government.

I'm not surprised you think that considering how badly you've butchered your clumsy attempts to discuss economics. When I say that an ECON 101 student could embarrass you, I'm being generous. They offer introductory courses in high school and it's pretty clear you never even made it that far. It's like a dumb criminal trying threatening to sue police after being arrested based on Charter violations. He's heard about the Charter, but clearly doesn't have clue. The links I've provided are illustrations of how public sector unions can inflate compensation and don't follow standard workforce economics. The fact that they didn't directly reference the federal public service is a sad and flimsy deflection that suggests that federal public sector employees don't fare as well as municipal or provincial ones, which is completely false. Let's see what the PBO has to say (since you referenced it earlier to support your claims): The paper from Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page shows the average public servant costs taxpayers $114,100 a year in total compensation. What's more, the PBO says compensation in the federal service has outpaced inflation and that of other employees — both in business and other levels of government — over the last 13 years. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/budget-watchdog-finds-average-public-service-job-costs-114k-1.1174021 and I've explained that the education difference is accounted for when economists are stating public sector workers earn substantially more. Similarly educated, similarly skilled private sector workers earn less. Also, to highlight how truly full of crap you are, your previous statement that there aren't many low-skilled/low educated public sector employees is by virtue of your own math completely false. Nearly half of them don't have university education but are compensated as if they do. The older workforce argument is demonstrably circular logic. The reasons the workforce is older are that the pay is so much better and increases over time, the pensions are ridiculous and it's MUCH harder to get terminated with the union at your back. The idea that paying workers more automatically leads to value-added productivity is categorically false. This is true only up to a certain point and it's very clear from the low public-sector turnover and lack of job openings that this point was passed long ago. and it's equally easy for me to conclude that the above statement is made by an overpaid data-entry clerk working in a cubicle who's outraged that someone would question the sweet ride he's earned not by personal merit, but by collective bargaining at the taxpayers' expense. Is this true? Just as likely as not, but how am I supposed to know? Since you clearly missed my attempt to show how childish you sounded, I'll be more explicit: Insults (thinly veiled or not) are the ammunition of the unintelligent. Your position was that the current federal sick leave policies are reasonable or actually a boon to productivity. The PBO didn't say that, he merely said that hours lost to absenteeism aren't made up by over-time or substitute workers. Nice try though! Check out the CBC link I posted earlier. Compensation increases in the federal public service were higher than the CPI for the 13 years leading up to 2012, while private sector increases lagged well behind. Those poor federal public servants, earning $114,000/year in overall compensation! I feel so bad for them! I would expect that if you make the claim that there's an increasing trend of federal public servants leaving for the greener pastures (lol) of the private sector (ie. not full-pension retirement), you'd have some sort of reference or data to back that up. Otherwise, we can reasonably assume that the continued low turnover relative to the private sector suggests you're completely full of crap and giving us another useless testimonial. So what you're saying then is that the small percentage of public servants with the ACTUALLY impressive education/experience/credentials aren't paid enough. The fact that majority trend for the overall public service is lower turnover, however, suggests that this is simply a matter of overpaid low/mid level staff and underpaid high level staff. That's funny. First you propose the straw-man that reducing federal public sector benefits (regardless of them already being significantly more generous than private sector comparisons) would lead to a mass exodus of employees. Next, when called out for exaggerating, you suggest that I'm an American-centric Tea Party advocate. This is in addition to you earlier calling me uneducated. All of this offers a pretty clear indication of how poorly you're able to form an argument and how frustrated you get in your cubicle when someone questions your dubious conclusions.

Except nothing that he was quoting me for saying had anything specifically to do with the federal public service. I made it very clear what I was talking about. Good on you for trying to help bail out a bro though.

What does the Treasury Board have to do with my comment? The statement of yours that I quoted and responded to was: It took me a 30 seconds on Google to find two examples that prove you're totally clueless. Do you have any more goof statements to make, or do you want to embarrass yourself more?

This long, boring and useless testimonial can be summarized as follows: One time I had a lousy boss that was horrible to work for. 95% of people who've ever had a job could discuss a similar experience.

You're not offering facts. You're offering self-serving testimonials and brainless contradictions of economic theory which an ECON 101 student can thoroughly debunk. Where I've been providing links from a variety of sources (media, academic, actual CBA's etc), you've done nothing but natter on about how much smarter and more educated the Elite Public Servant class is (which ironically you belong/belonged to) and how horribly downtrodden its members are despite virtually all objective comparisons suggesting otherwise. Your delusions go even further, however, as you've now made the farcical conclusion that my criticism of the public service stems merely from jealousy. After embarrassing yourself trying to discuss economics and failing to provide meaningful facts and comparisons for your position, you've neatly and conveniently bundled all of my arguments thus far as the jealous ranting of an uneducated private sector plebe. I could similarly say that your defence of the public sector is the self-serving tantrum of an overpaid career bureaucrat with a lousy liberal arts degree. Maybe you're just worried that everyone will find out that data-entry positions are easily and cheaply replaced!? The PBO did NOT support your position. It merely stated that federal sick leave benefits don't lead to incremental costs, since there is little/no allowance in the budget to provide relief for absent employees. This is not an endorsement or condemnation either way in regards to productivity. But in most cases, the report said, federal employees who call in sick are not replaced, resulting in no additional cost to taxpayers over and above regular public servant salaries. http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/pbo-report-finds-no-incremental-costs-to-federal-civil-service-sick-leave-267312151.html From your OWN link: The expected increase in the private sector is three per cent, while the average increase for employees in the public sector is expected to be 2.7 per cent. When you take into account that public sector wages have risen significantly faster over the last ~15 years than private sector ones, this doesn't appear to be the crime you're suggesting it is. Are we seeing this? Do you have any numbers to back that up, or are you just providing more testimonials? It's usually termed, derisively, as the golden pension by us private-sector normals. Yes, but this statement would imply that there are actually greener pastures for these folks and only further highlights your sad logic. Reducing benefits to "fantastic" from "insane" wouldn't lead to the mass exodus you're implying. There comes a point in time where it becomes clear the net marginal return on benefit spending is negative. The football team can replace players with poor attitudes and mediocre performance. The public sector gives them regular wage and benefit increases.

Wait, they don't offer things like automatic pay raises based on years worked? Really? At the five-year rate, an elementary teacher at the Waterloo Region District School Board is earning $66,893 and according to Johnson, that puts teachers at the 75th percentile — meaning only 25 per cent of Canadians earn more than them. At the 10-year rate, a teacher earns $88,759. http://www.therecord.com/news-story/2619721-nothing-middle-class-about-teachers-salaries-prof-says/ Even better, from a 30-second Google search, I was able to bring up a relatively recent CBA negotiated by the Public Service Alliance of Canada: 41.01 Seniority shall be a prime factor applied in determining preference for promotions, transfers, lay-off and recall. http://www.neu.ca/sites/all/themes/employee/pdfs/ca/gjoa_haven_hamlet.pdf So basically we can say that you're completely full of crap. Got it.

Too dumb of a question to answer. Also, 'ingratiate' doesn't mean the same thing as be his/her bi***. If you're talking about the private sector, sure. Since we weren't, then no, because the public sector CBA's make it difficult/impossible to offer much of what you just mentioned. I guess you missed the whole part about promotion/pay raises by seniority, rather than exceptional work. A fairly common complaint for union workers themselves, let alone the people who pay them.

Michael all of this is essentially true, but there are a few pieces missing from the overall picture. To start, employee/manager relations are fundamentally different in union vs non-union work environments. I'd rather be brief about why, as this could spiral into another discussion entirely, but the basic principles are easily summarized. A unionized (particularly public sector) workplace often leads to a an environment where management and employees are working towards opposite ends. When CBA's dictate automatic increases to compensation over time and outline minimum standards of performance, workers lose a lot of the incentive they would otherwise have to excel and to ingratiate themselves with their boss. They also cause increased retention of lousy/mediocre/toxic employees, as on the one hand they're harder to terminate and at the same time the prospect of increased pay over time makes them less likely to leave. The managers, invariably, are tasked with the unenviable goal of increasing the efficiency and performance of their workers with little to motivate and encourage them with. Why would you accept the suggestion that you should work harder when you aren't going to rewarded for it and cannot be punished for not complying? You wouldn't. You're therefore often left with a dysfunctional workplace where managers are constantly berating employees (who aren't even listening) to improve their performance. It's easy to see how this sort of dynamic would lead to miserable manager/employee relations. The worst part is that this sort of friction festers and worsens over time and eventually becomes toxic. By the time a new CBA needs to be signed, you have miserable employees negotiating with frustrated and pissed off managers that probably hate each other. It's no surprise that this process ends up being antagonistic.

Gee, you think? Your reasoning throughout this discussion has been based on nothing but selective application of fact. Your brainless/choosy interpretation of economic theory (as it applies to the public sector) shows us everything we need to know about how ignorant and/or delusional you are on the subject. Who said they weren't? We have enough examples over the last few decades of exactly what I'm describing to make it pretty obvious. Look at the transition from Trudeau/Mulroney spending to Chretien/Martin cuts, or David Peterson/Bob Rae deficits leading to the infamous Mike Harris. Yup, that's pure delusion! I completely made all of that up.... Which unsurprisingly proves absolutely nothing. You provide these 'details' with no context or comparison to the private sector, suggesting somehow that these draconian wage freezes were happening while private sector wages were flourishing. They weren't. Oops! Yeah, sure. It has nothing to do with federal finances or with public servants already being well paid and having superior benefits. It's just a bunch of mean-spirited political jerks out to score points... What a travesty! Why don't you tell us how the private sector fared?? Remember how you like to quote economic theory in your arguments? Why don't we apply it to this nightmarish scenario of public sector wage freezes or below-inflation annual raises? Here goes: If wages/benefits in the public sector were rising too slowly and employees weren't satisfied with them, they would leave, right? They would find better paying jobs in the private sector, just like you suggested private sector workers would join the public sector if the reverse were true. Unfortunately for you, my deluded friend, the public sector is not experiencing labor shortages (usually the exact opposite) and has far better employee retention rates. What this means, therefore, is that essentially EVERYTHING you said about labour economics as they pertain to the public sector was pure crap.

Oh poor you. It's been worse in the private sector.

Oh poor you! Most people aren't rich, so the fact that YOU are not rich does literally nothing to support your argument. Logic!

Your disagreement, once again, is based on a self-serving bias. The perversion of reality you offer up with this misguided comparison ignores the inconvenient facts that prove it ridiculous. Nowhere but in the public service sector are the employees in a position to 'vote out' their bosses if they disagree with changes in their workplace and compensation. In the private sector, a worker's only option is to leave and try to find a different job. Public sector employees, however, probably control something like 25-35% of the overall vote (combine the % of the overall pop in the public service, add their spouses/voting-age children, assume for obvious reasons that almost all of them vote, and then compare that to voter turnout). When the government (the employer) knows that 1/4 to 1/3 of the total vote will mobilize against it if any attempts are made to curb public excess, the prospect becomes daunting. Only when public finances and sentiment deteriorate to a sufficient extent to mobilize voters against the public service is anything ever done about it. Unfortunately, the cyclical nature of this phenomenon necessitates that the infrequent but inevitable push-back comes down heavy. The outrage we subsequently see from the public service and its supporters, while understandable, is also misguided. It's simply an overdue adjustment to a system out of balance.

Your misguided attempts to apply standard open-market economic principles on a public service discussion is the only thing that makes no sense. It's a laughable perversion of theory which borrows the parts that you like and blissfully ignores the parts that you don't. I'm sorry, but the idea that only the 'best and the brightest' enter the public service and stay there is a self-serving conceit that, while founded on the reasonable belief that the people hired are the ones that have the best resumes and interviews, ignores a host of issues that throw your conclusions out the door. First, an interview and resume are at best an imprecise measurement of someone's suitability for the job. Most turnover occurs because managers misjudge potential employee's character, drive and qualifications. Next, once the error has become apparent, the public sector unions make it MUCH harder for the problem candidate to lose their job. At this point, the public sector worker can coast, doing the absolute bare minimum the job requires to not get fired. Additionally, the CBA's for most of the public sector unions dictate mandatory wage increases based on tenure, so these uninspired, barely-functional and perhaps even unpleasant employees actually get REWARDED on a regular basis with automatic pay raises. There are tens of thousands of low-skilled, low-knowledge employees in the federal public sector alone (it was around 80,000 in 2006 according to Statscan). While I'll accept the fact that they have declined in numbers with more computers and automated systems, they are not disappearing and the government will always need faces at counters, office assistants, call-centre operators etc. When you add up all of the provincial, municipal and crown corporation numbers together, there are far more than you would have us believe. Because your assumption that people can just apply and 'get' government jobs is a myth. Like I said before, it's based on perverted economic theory and flies completely contrary to the actual real life job market. The low turnover (due to benefits, job protection and automatic pay raises) makes entry or mid level postings in the public sector rare, and on top of that there's a strong preference towards visible minorities and bilingualism. Similarly skilled non-minority anglophones, despite comprising the majority of the population, form a minority in the public service. On top of this, the government locates a lot of its administration in depressed (or out of the way) communities in order to support local economies, further refuting your claim that the government is only hiring the 'best' candidates.

We've already been over this. Similarly skilled, similarly educated people get paid more (counting generous benefit packages) in the public sector. There is no statistical reason for that. The myth that there aren't low-skilled people in the public service and that it's just McDonald's employees that are bringing the private sector averages down is farcical as well. There are TONS of low-skilled front-end clerks in the public service, but they do not get paid low-skilled wages and benefits. I can tell you from direct knowledge that the girl you get your Driver's License stamp from at the Service Canada office makes more money than the Assistant Manager at most chartered banks. Neither of these jobs are particularly high skilled, but it's a FACT that the assistant BM at the bank has far more responsibility, far more required knowledge and just as much, if not more, regulatory and due-diligence requirements.

Don't quote my entire post in its entirety (immediately below my post) and then offer a one-sentence response. You're just clogging board space and it's against the forum rules. As an answer, I'm not looking for workers to be brought low. I'm looking for the public sector to be brought back to parity with the private sector -- nothing more, nothing less.