Contact:
Tim Kauffman
202-639-6405/202-374-6491
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WASHINGTON – An update to the Congressional Budget Office’s 2012 comparison of federal and private-sector compensation relies on the same faulty assumptions as the earlier report, resulting in highly politicized and inaccurate conclusions, the American Federation of Government Employees said today.
“This report is designed to justify the elimination of a pay system that does an excellent job of avoiding pay discrimination in the federal government,” AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr. said.
“According to scientific studies by the government’s own wage experts at the Office of Personnel Management and Bureau of Labor Statistics, federal employees on average earn 34 percent less today than employees performing comparable jobs in the private sector,” Cox said. “The Congressional Budget Office ignores these data and instead focuses on educational attainment as the basis on which pay comparisons are made. The CBO approach is not useful for pay-setting but it’s very useful for those who want to cut wages and salaries for the federal workforce.”
Specifically, the CBO report:
“The Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics produces a far more accurate assessment of the pay gap between federal government employees and private-sector workers,” Cox said. “These data show that federal employees earn far less than their peers doing similar jobs in the private sector. The law relies on these BLS data for making pay determinations because these are the highest quality, most reliable data on which to base pay-setting.”
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