Fraser Institute tilts data on public/private pay

Disinformation offers faulty comparisons.

by Ish Theilheimer

The Fraser Institute is at it again. For all practical purposes and extension of the Conservative Party war room, the Institute specializes in pumping out so-called studies and research proving the Earth is flat, black is white, and anything else that suits the neocons who run this country. Then they use their vast resources to pump out disinformation to every possible media outlet.

And yet, despite being the propaganda arm of Canada's conservative movement, the Institute, amazingly, has managed to maintain charitable status.

In the USA, the Fraser Institute has been a great ally to the Republicans in their fight against public health care. Many Americans, even progressive-minded ones, now believe Canadians  endure long waits for medical care and health care rationing, thanks to the Institute effectively flooding US media with such falsehoods.

Misinformation doesn't faze the Fraser Institute. Last fall, it issued a "study" on public-sector pension liabilities — a favourite hobbyhorse of neocons — that it was forced to retract and remove from its website due to egregious inaccuracies. Even so, it got plenty of news hits for the erroneous conclusions of that "study."

Now the Institute has published a new "study" claiming to show that public sector workers get paid too much, about 12 percent more than private-sector workers. It's all part of the conservatives' relentless campaign against government.

Before looking at all that's wrong with this latest propaganda piece dressed up as a study, think about the public sector workers you know. If you work for the public, think about your own situation.

It's really hard to get a public sector job without a lot of training and qualifications. The competition is fierce, resulting in a highly-qualified workforce. Keeping good workers is not easy if they are not paid properly. This is one reason public sector wages and benefits have to be competitive.

Public sector workers are publicly accountable full-time, and scrutinized constantly. Few private-sector workers are watched so closely, by managers, by the people they work with, and by the general public. If you make over $100,000 a year, you get your name put in the media in provinces like Ontario. You don't get this scrutiny when you work for a private employer.

Then there's the client/public side: do you really want second-choice people, people who couldn't get good jobs elsewhere, running your public transit, putting out fires, taking care of Grandma, or teaching school? I don't.

Of course, there's a moral argument. Public employers should be good employers. If it's OK for government to be bad employers, this gives a signal to private employers they can be awful. This helps no one, except, possibly, some cut-throat employers.

If you're not yet a bit skeptical about Fraser's intent, look at the so-called study. It uses data from Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey from just one month — April 2011 — to come to blanket conclusions about comparative wages. The analysis doesn't account for such basic factors as occupation, nor does it report on actual wages. Without using a much larger and substantial sample, such as census data, and considering actual wages in similar occupations in the private and public sectors, these comparisons can't be considered valid representations of reality in any way.

The Institute, “compared public and private sectors without looking at the differences between pay for public and private employees doing the same job,” economist Armine Yalnizyan of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives told me. “Comparing public and private sector pay is meaningless if the underlying occupational pool and distribution is different. And it [pay] also varies from federal to provincial to municipal employees. The Fraser Institute lumps everything together."

Yalnizyan says the Institute is wrong about how much better-off public sectors workers are in terms of pensions. "The private sector, with much lower rates of coverage, is wildly polarized. That's because of the erosion in defined benefit (DB) plans in the private sector, only about half of those who have pensions have DB now — and you can bet it's the best paid workers, unionized and management, because they're no idiots!"

There is, indeed, a small wage gap between public and private, largely based on more equitable pay for women working in the public sector compared with private sector counterparts. The Fraser Institute and its fans would like to wipe out the modest gains women have made in pay equity after years of struggle.

Progressives need to ensure that the Fraser Institute's lie machine is always refuted with straight goods.

© Copyright 2013 Ish Theilheimer, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca