Border War: The Wage Factor

Posted at 8:25 PM on February 22, 2011 by Tim Nelson
Filed under: MN Legislature, Mark Dayton

We had a story last week comparing the retirement and health benefits of public sector workers in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Those are the highest-profile points of the economic battle being waged between Wis. Gov. Scott Walker and the public employee unions in the Badger State.

But many contended the picture wasn't complete without a look at wages, since bargaining units often trade one for the other -- typically retirement benefits or health premiums in lieu of up-front pay. It was hard to run all that down in time for Friday morning's story.

The reason: It's very, very difficult to compare. No one in either state tracks health benefits for teachers overall. And while state-by-state wage data is available, it's typically for individual occupations, without distinguishing between private and public sector workers.

That said, there are some jobs that are largely public. School teachers. Fire fighters. Cops and judges. Information on those is available from a single source, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Below you'll find a table drawn from that data, for a series of jobs.

The bottom line? Mixed. For some jobs, like teachers, the USBLS said median wages in Wisconsin actually led Minnesota in 2009, despite Wisconsin's comparatively generous pension benefits. For others, like court, municipal and licensing clerks (also likely public employees), Minnesotans get a pretty noticable 24 percent premium.

A few caveats here: the teacher numbers do not distinguish between public and private schools, although the biggest proportion are presumably public school teachers. The clerk numbers also do not distinguish between the differences in the judicial systems in the two states: Wisconsin has 252 municipal courts, as well as a state 10-district Circuit Court system. Minnesota has had an exclusively state court system since 1986. That may as well explain the wide disparity in the judge salaries.

At any rate, here are the numbers, ranked by USBLS median salary data in 2009.

Select Employee Wages in the Upper Midwest

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Data dowloaded 2/22/2011, dated May, 2009. Annual wages calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by 2080 hours; where an hourly mean wage is not published the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data. Data can be accessed at http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm

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