It’s misleading to cite average salaries of state employees, said Ron Jordan, executive director of the Virginia Governmental Employees Association, an advocacy organization with a membership of 20,000 state employees. High-paying jobs at state colleges and universities skew the numbers, he said.

“As a group, they’re paid substantially more than the rest of the workforce, which tends to distort the number, because their pay includes state money as well as money coming from private funds like for endowed chairs,” Jordan said.

Hugh Keogh, president and CEO of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, said he’d be surprised if most jobs were paid better by the state than by private employers.

“As a former state employee, my instincts are that state employees are probably in the 10 to 15 percent range below private workers,” said Keogh, who used to direct the state’s economic development agency. “But they’ve always been supported with a very strong benefits package and many state employees are very satisfied and are looking forward to a very pleasant retirement.”

While average pay for state employees jumped $5,000 from 2006 to 2008, their earnings have more recently grown only incrementally as the state has faced budget deficits. The average state employee earned $50,369 last year and earns $50,600 this year.

And the last time the general assembly approved a statewide raise for employees was in 2007. Since then, agency heads have had to draw from existing funds in order to raise a worker’s salary, Weaver said.

Data on private-sector earnings beyond 2008 is not available from the BLS or from Virginia’s Employment Commission.

Facing a $4.6 billion budget gap this year, legislators cut about $600 million from social services and education and avoided more cuts by approving millions in new fees and borrowing money from the state pension fund. Legislators also rejected a proposal to require employees to contribute to their retirement for the first time since the 1980s.

Despite the sizable cuts, the state’s workforce is about as large as it was in 2007. About 2,500 state employees have been laid off or vacated their positions since a high point in 2008, when the state employed 98,900 workers. The state workforce has grown by 7.5 percent since 2001.

Jordan says lawmakers have prioritized state employees, despite the budget woes. He’s very happy with how Gov. Bob McDonnell and legislators have responded to their needs.

“Gov. McDonnell’s very much been reaching out to state employees, soliciting interviews,” Jordan said. “(And) the general assembly, when all was said and done, was very protective of its state employees.”

Salaries for state employees range broadly, from university professors at the top of the spectrum down to food service workers at Virginia’s mental health institutions.

Currently, University of Virginia Provost Arthur Garson is the highest-paid Virginia employee, although some of his $706,800 salary is funded privately through an endowed chair. The highest-paid non-university employee is Meredith Cary, who earns $260,000 as a physiatrist for the Department of Corrections.

Eileen Norcross, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, has researched private versus public sector pay. Like Jordan, she warned that comparing average pay for state and private workers across the board can be misleading because the types of jobs offered in each sector vary.

As to who should get paid more for the same job—state or private employees—Norcross says there are arguments on both sides.

Advocates of higher pay for public employees say they tend to be more highly educated than private-sector workers, Norcross said. But others point out that government jobs tend to be more stable, offer better benefit packages and require fewer hours, she said.

“In the past, one of the ways to think about public sector employees was they were trading off a very stable job with good benefits in exchange for a salary less than what you would get in the private sector,” Norcross said
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