Pay, Perks & Parachutes Why should public employees receive more compensation than what similar work is worth in the private sector? Fair question, I’d say. We often hear of businesses unable to compete with wages & benefits paid by government. Recently a friend’s company lost a heavy-duty mechanic to a local municipality. Why’d the employee leave? Higher wages, longer vacation leave, more sick days & a shorter work week. (If you’ve seen the statistics on how many sick days government employees take, you’d think there was an epidemic.) No level of government has any money of its own. It’s all taxpayer money. So in the example of the mobile mechanic’s former employer, it’s like he’s paying part of his profits to a competitor to lure employees away with promises of better wages. Businesses can’t survive, let alone prosper under these circumstances, and their customers suffer from reduced services. Whatever reasons are used to justify or explain the practice, it’s wrong. Flat wrong! As Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman & his wife, Rose, clearly inform us in their famous book, Free to Choose, the more money government takes out of the economy the lower the standard of living inevitably becomes. The reason is that government is the least efficient spender. Other people are spending other people’s money on other people. Where’s the incentive to be cost effective? (Answer: there ain’t none!) Such spending is often to buy votes or curry favor with a powerful constituency. The contracts negotiated are generally richer than market conditions require. The more money left in the hands (control) of those who earned it, the wiser and more effectively that money will be spent. It’s a universal law, ignored at increasingly greater cost by almost all levels of government. And what about the perks & parachutes? All of us are upset & disgusted by examples of executive waste in Alberta Health Services. We fear theyre typical of other government agencies. Its record is disgraceful. Executives are over paid and shamefully compensated. When they fail to properly accomplish the results they were hired to achieve, what are the consequences of their failure? A profligate payout and sometimes even a new job elsewhere within the organization or an untendered contract. Double dipped in golden sauce… It’s not right and it ought to stop. When the Alberta government achieves this, we’ll all know we really are under new management.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 18:19:48 +0000
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