Here’s a fascinating analysis by Rep. Dan McGuire (who, not incidentally, holds a Ph.D. from M.I.T. and who sits on the State House Finance Committee, which is responsible for preparing the NH state budget). We owe Rep. McGuire a debt of gratitude for doing the necessary research; New Hampshire is indeed fortunate to have Republican Representatives like him and others who are busy repairing the damage done by the majority Democrats between 2006 and 2010. —Tim Condon
From Rep. Dan McGuire:
I prepared a spreadsheet showing the total spent on people working for the state from the Governor’s budget. Since the House didn’t change the salary for any given person (we just reduced personnel) the per-person averages for our budget will be roughly the same….The average government employee union worker will get a salary of $51,000, benefits of $32,000 and miscellaneous other compensation of about $4,000, for a total annual average of $87,000. The 341 unclassified employees average $118,000 in pay. Benefits aren’t broken down separately for classified (union) and unclassified (non-union), so I would just use the same $32,000 overall average, for a total of about $150,000 per unclassified employee. If you want to be really accurate you could knock 2% off those figures because of the 27th pay period in FY12. Call it $50,000 in salary and $85,000 total for the average unionized state employee.
The difficult part is comparing these numbers to the private sector because of the way the government presents statistics. According to the latest report by the New Hampshire Employment Security, Economic and Labor Market Information Bureau, the average wage (salary) in New Hampshire is $21.36 an hour. If you multiply that by 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, you get a total of $44,429. However, most state employees are only contracted to work 37.5 hours a week (8:00 to 4:00 with a half hour lunch, I believe), so 37.5 x 52 x $21.36 is $41,652, or about $9,000 less than a unionized state worker. In other words, we could say that on salary alone, the average state worker gets 20% more than the average private sector worker.
Even more difficult is finding the value of benefits in the private sector. The latest state-wide benefits survey is four years old and doesn’t include any dollar amounts. It just lists what fraction of employees have medical insurance, for example, without talking about the costs or deductibles of those plans. The best available data seems to be this information from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It says that for the Northeast region (the most expensive in the country), average salaries are $22.04 an hour (very similar to NH’s $21.36) and benefits are $9.59 an hour (44% of salary). For state workers, the $35,000 in benefits is 70% of the $50,000 in salary.
So the bottom line is that the average private sector worker in New Hampshire receives $31 an hour in salary and benefits, or just under $65,000 a year in total compensation for a 40-hour week. The typical state worker is getting $85,000 in total compensation (30% more) for a 37.5-hour week.
Dan McGuire
P.S. Note that payments for retiree medical benefits and the $3.5 billion unfunded pension liability in New Hampshire are not included in these figures, even though they do represent some compensation for both former and current retirees for which there are few equivalents in the private sector.