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The Nutmeg State’s public-employee unions tell taxpayers that government here isn’t overloaded with staff. Based on Connecticut’s population, they assert, the public payroll ranks below the national average. So, too, does government employment as a percentage of the total workforce.

Surprisingly, both claims are largely accurate. But when you look at the rest of the data, the exorbitant cost of bureaucracy in Connecticut becomes blindingly clear.

The period between 1992 and 2007 is a good decade-and-a-half to examine, since it offers reliable statistics for both government and private-sector jobs in Connecticut. Let’s start with state employees. In 1992, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the state had 54,184 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers. (In census-speak, FTE “is calculated by dividing the ‘part-time hours paid’ by the standard number of hours for full-time employees … and then adding the resulting quotient to the number of full-time employees.”)

By 2007, FTE employees had reached 61,823 — a growth rate of 14.1 percent, during a time when private employment grew by only 9.7 percent. (Nationally, nongovernment jobs grew by about 28 percent — nearly three times Connecticut’s anemic performance.)

As for wages and salaries, Connecticut’s state-employee unions and their lackeys in the legislature made sure that pay more than keep pace with inflation. In 2007, the average annual earnings by an FTE employee were $59,802 — up from an inflation-adjusted $57,123 in 1992.

Many taxpayers assume the story must be different at the local level — after all, aren’t budgets regularly defeated by voters, prompting municipal officials to complain about brutal “layoffs”?

If local bureaucrats faced mass termination in the last 15 years, the Census Bureau can’t find any evidence. Between 1992 and 2007, the number of FTE employees in municipal government rose 27.4 percent, from 98,711 to 125,722.

Unlike state employees, the average municipal staffer saw his or her inflation-adjusted income drop just a bit, from $55,385 to $52,483. Tough break, but given cities’ and towns’ massive hiring binge, the total payroll cost to taxpayers still rose by 20.7 percent.

How does state- and local-worker pay fare against the private sector? According to the latest survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the all-worker category, government employees in the New York metro area (which includes municipalities in Fairfield, New Haven, and Litchfield Counties) earn 27.7 percent more in average hourly wages. In Greater Hartford, the public premium is a stunner: 48 percent. In the service sector, pay is nearly double for government jobs in both regions.

Remember, the numbers we’ve scrutinized are wages and salaries. They don’t represent total compensation. Benefits in Connecticut government still exist in a Neverland with a surfeit of paid holidays/vacations, ludicrously low copays and pathetically small premium-sharing, plus set-for life, defined-benefit pensions.

The retirement-income obligation faced by taxpayers was enormous even before Wall Street began its harrowing plunge. Pols in Hartford underfunded the pension accounts for state employee and teachers for years, even when times were good. Combined, the two unmet liabilities top $15 billion.
 
Big pension gaps also exist at the local level. In March, the (Bridgeport) Connecticut Post’s Bill Cummings reported that since the stock-market tumble, “Fairfield’s pension fund … lost nearly $100 million, or 28 percent of its value. Bridgeport lost $70 million in one fund, or about 30 percent of value. Milford’s pension fund dropped $158 million.”

But wait — there’s more. Other post-employment benefits (OPEB ), a compensation category that includes most of the perks employers supply to retirees but pensions, is a giant asteroid aimed right at taxpayers’ wallets. At the state level, the OPEB burden is $21.5 billion. (No one has bothered to document the figure for municipal government.)

The truly maddening thing about public payrolls in Connecticut is that unless you’re adept at tracking down — and processing — employment data from state and federal agencies, you’re likely to get an incomplete picture about the bill we face for bureaucrats. Into that vacuum step our friends in state and local government, who use scare tactics and claims of their “efficiency” to cling to excessive pay and benefits.

Here’s a proposal: Each municipality’s website, as well as the state’s, should post average salaries, detailed overviews of employee benefits, retirement-income liabilities, OPEB costs, and how staffs have grown/shrunk, relative to population, over the last few decades. How could anyone object to creating such cheap, easily accessible tools for taxpayers to judge the price and productivity of their “public servants”? It’s not as if Connecticut’s government-employee unions have anything to hide. Do they?

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.

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