---

Public employee unions: Entitled to their own views, but not their own facts
...Regardless, what's clear is that when correcting for these omissions and inappropriate assumptions in EcPI's regression, you find that public employees are not underpaid relative to their private sector counterparts. In fact, according to their own analysis, public employees at both the state and local levels enjoy a compensation premium of close to five percent compared to an employee of similar education and experience in the private sector.

That five percent pay premium should be considered a floor, not a ceiling. Public sector workers enjoy substantially greater job security than their private sector counterparts; their layoff and discharge rate as a percent of total employment is over three times lower than the private sector as a whole....

...State pension plans are underfunded by $3.2 trillion when misguided accounting practices are corrected according to research by Joshua D. Rauh, an associate professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management, and Robert Novy-Marx at the University of Chicago, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Furthermore, because pension funds are highly exposed to market risks, there is only a 5 percent chance that they will perform well enough to meet the needs of retirees in fifteen years. ...