Federal employees do plenty of sharing already

The editorial “Federal pay freeze a good first step” makes three mistakes [Opinion, Dec. 2].

First, The Times argues that federal employees should “share in the financial sacrifice.” As a federal employee, I would feel a lot better about sacrifice if it was really shared.

The Times notes the low percentage of cost-of-living raises we have gotten. These pale beside the recent gains of the wealthy, in percentage terms and certainly in dollar amounts. The sacrifice is not being shared. Instead, people in the middle are being told that our pay is being cut, our benefits reduced, our job security weakened and our retirement jeopardized. Meanwhile, the wealthiest are partying on. Some sharing!

Second, reducing federal expenditures in a time of recession works against the stimulus that virtually all economists say is desperately needed now. Federal employees, by definition, are middle class. The top salary is about $150,000, and the average $60,000 to $80,000; we spend what we earn.

By what economic logic does it help the recovery to reduce consumer spending by the $28 billion of this cut? Instead, you would give a tax cut of $700 billion (25 times larger) to people making more than $250,000, much of which will be saved and thus not contribute to the recovery.

Third, The Times would like to reduce government in unspecified ways. That is cheap talk until The Times says, specifically, what government services can be done away with. Does The Times think we don’t need the federal courts, prisons and FBI? The Federal Aviation Administration? The interstate highways? The EPA? Does The Times not want a weather forecast?

In fact, the whole mechanism of government, including the pay of the workers who do all these things and more, is less than 15 percent of the federal budget, and most of these tasks are necessary to the functioning of a modern society. What The Times is really proposing is cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Now we are back to my first point about “shared sacrifice”.

— William S. Kessler, Seattle

A pay freeze is an ‘attack on middle-class federal workers’

When it comes to the federal pay freeze, The Seattle Times should take a closer look at the facts before characterizing the proposal as shared sacrifice. The government’s own Office of Personnel Management has found that — even factoring in benefits — public workers make significantly less than their counterparts with comparable education and experience in the private sector. What’s more, the Center for Economic Policy Research reports that cutting federal pay will mean a loss of $2.5 billion in consumption by 2012, which translates to a loss of 18,000 private-sector jobs over the same period.

The attack on middle-class federal workers isn’t just misguided, it’s also shamelessly hypocritical. Remember, the far right saw no problem with taxpayer dollars funding huge executive compensation packages for Wall Street banks.

That’s not to say that private-sector workers shouldn’t be angry about the inadequate compensation they receive. But the solution isn’t to scapegoat and further squeeze those who devote their lives to civil service. Let’s agree instead to push our new legislators to support economic policies that work for all of us.

— Kimberly Freeman Brown, executive director, American Rights at Work

Pay freeze targets wrong crowd, leaves bigwigs untouched

Another editorial by The Seattle Times in support of a race to the bottom by American workers. Federal workers have done their sacrificing. The average federal worker is a GS 7, making barely a family living wage of $44,176. The average federal worker makes 22 percent less — by independent studies — then comparable work in the private sector.

My husband worked for 40 years in the military and federal government. With his skills he could have worked for Microsoft for double the money. The only federal workers making $150,000, purported to be the average federal wage, are members of Congress, their staff, justices and private contractors. Their wages are being excluded from the freeze.

Where is the shared sacrifice by the financial managers, the money lenders, the brokers? They kept their huge wages and got large bonuses this year. And now they want to keep their 10-year tax cut bonuses. The Republicans support them in their desire to not share in the “financial sacrifice of the employment sectors.”

Stop picking on federal workers and start demanding sacrifice by those who did benefit from the collapse of our economic system.

— Doreen Suran, Bellevue

Federal pay on much lower footing than that of the private sector

There have been years when federal employees received pay increases in excess of the increases enjoyed by the private sector. 2010, however, wasn’t one of them, since the private-sector average wage increase was 3.4 percent based on wage information reported to the Social Security Administration. According to the Congressional Research Service’s most recent annual report on federal pay, “Federal Employees: Pay and Pension Increases Since 1969,” over the long haul, pay increases of federal employees have lagged significantly behind the increases received by the private sector, Social Security recipients and even retired federal employees. The gap between federal pay increases and the Consumer Price Index is even larger.

— Paul Weibel, Seattle