Add a Comment
Email This
Statistics
RE: Put it in perspective
Being a teacher(Pre-k) I will tell you we do not get off early in the afternoons, and grading papers sometimes is not all that easy. Im usually at the school till about 5 or 6 getting ready for the next day, and the next week.I'm at the school at 6:15 every morning too. We may have summers off, but we still have trainings to go to, to continue our education. It's not as easy as many people think.
RE: Put it in perspective
What I do mean to imply is that when you work for the goverment - local, State, or Federal - you're gonna get hosed on the paycheck, and that the payback is job satisfaction and knowing that you are responsible for the betterment of society.
Baloney. When you work for the government on any level you're going to get paid equally to and probably better than a private sector employee- and when you retire you'll have a good pension, unlike 81% of private-sector workers.
This study will disabuse you of the "government worker pay gap" myth.
The reasons are obvious: federal government employees' pay and raises come from a bottomless pit. Private companies cannot run a deficit like Uncle Sam. Job turnover for federal "workers" is much lower than the private sector. And are their jobs hard? Is the ID card lady busting her butt every day from 9:30 to 4:30? I don't think so!
On the state and local level, I would love to see some job turnover stats, or some anecdotal stories of people like teachers leaving the government workforce for a better-paying private sector job. You won;t find much. Teachers have a good deal. I am sure most do it for the love of teaching, but there are a lot of 'em out there who are in it for the job security and the pension- just like the Army's officer corps. For every high-speed battalion commander there is a slug major on staff holding on until his 20 years are up.
Personally, I see what federal largesse does every day here in northern Virginia, home of the two richest counties in America (the third is in Maryland). All three counties are DC suburbs. The median household income is over $90,000 and the median home price is over $500,000. Try telling me federal workers are underpaid as I drive past their Lexus RX330s and McMansions and park my Toyota compact outside of the apartment I rent for $1600 on my private-sector pay (and yes, my take-home is about $2000 lower a month than I was making as a captain in the Army).
RSS
Put it in perspective
Let me preface this by saying that teachers are underpaid and it is an incredibly important job that is clearly underappreciated.
Lets say that an average teacher pulls down $40,000 a year - for 9 months work. The summers are off right? Then, they get off of work in the early afternoon, get the weekends off, and don't work nights (except for the occasional parent-teacher night.) Grading papers is a little overtime, but then, it can be done on the couch at home with CSI running in the background. (And I'm not entirely certain its all that much work; once I established myself as an "A" student in high school, I don't think anyone actually read my papers. Or, at least I still got an "A" on my 11th grade history paper where I included a paragraph in the middle of it about the wonders of the Butterfinger.)
Lets contrast this, then, with a police officer, FBI Agent or officer in the military. I'm most familiar with the latter (obviously), and can tell you that a Captain with 4 years experience gets less than $50,000 for a year in a combat zone where he works all 365 days. Now, I've picked up 2 years experience since then, and make a good bit more. I had briefly considered alternate career options, so looked into what an FBI agent makes. They get less than I do. Texas Highway Patrol? About half what I do. The Border Patrol? Fuggedaboudit.
I don't mean to imply that teachers are less important or heroic than security folks. My hat is off to teachers, especially the ones that teach really young students. I've stared down 3000 Iraqi's throwing rocks at me, but I'm not quite ready for a platoon sized element of ankle biters running around.
What I do mean to imply is that when you work for the goverment - local, State, or Federal - you're gonna get hosed on the paycheck, and that the payback is job satisfaction and knowing that you are responsible for the betterment of society.
View Full Discussion