Saving or Preserving Government Jobs or, How Recession-Proof is Your Public-Sector Parachute?

Nick Gillespie | August 20, 2009

The NY Times reports on a new study that shows government employment is, if not recession-proof, pretty well covered in Kevlar compared to the private sector:

While the private sector has shed 6.9 million jobs since the beginning of the recession, state and local governments have expanded their payrolls and added 110,000 jobs....

Government jobs are always more stable than private sector jobs during downturns, but their ability to weather the current deep recession startled Donald J. Boyd, the senior fellow at the [Nelson Rockefeller] institute who wrote the report.

"I am a little surprised at the fact that state and local government has remained as stable as it has in the nation as a whole, given the depth of the current recession," Mr. Boyd said in an interview....

The expansion, coming as many states and localities are raising taxes, troubled Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst for the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group in Washington. "That is disturbing," Mr. DeHaven said. "Basically what you have is your producers in society losing their jobs and looking for work, and their tax burden isn't necessarily going down - and as a matter of fact they are likely to face tax increases going forward - and government growing."

The story notes that government cuts in jobs are coming (sure). Remember this the next time your state and local budget officers tell you that they've "cut to the bone," meaning they've trimmed 1 percent or less of their workforce while your company's staffing is down by double digits. Whole thing here.

Here's a great chart that accompanied the story.

Comments

|8.20.09 @ 10:14AM|#

Why lay anyone off when we can just print more money?

Tomcat1066|8.20.09 @ 10:23AM|#

I know our local government, for a town of about 54,000, has about 900 city employees and the only termination I know of was for a deputy city manager who turned out to be so corrupt that he wouldn't even be able to function in Chicago.

They like to pretend that they're helping the economy by not laying people off, rather than realizing that the tax payers are getting boned in the process.

Neu Mejican|8.20.09 @ 10:44AM|#

Eyeballing those graphs I notice this...the steeper the increase in government sector jobs during the shaded period (the recession), the quicker the recovery in the private sector. The closer to flat the government jobs during the recession, the weaker the recovery in the private sector.

I wouldn't make too much of that, but I find it interesting that these graphs are being used as they are.

|8.20.09 @ 10:46AM|#

I saw a stat on the news a couple nights ago that Washington, DC was the job-growth capital of the US.

No, really?

|8.20.09 @ 12:48PM|#

Neu Mejican: Perhaps the stronger the recovery the steeper the gub'ment slope and the faster the private rebound? Or here's another story: The worse the recession the greater the pressure for gub'ment to go on a hiring spree?

Neu Mejican|8.20.09 @ 1:24PM|#

Brandybuck,

Perhaps the stronger the recovery the steeper the gub'ment slope and the faster the private rebound?

That wouldn't explain the slope in the shaded areas...unless I am missing something.

Or here's another story: The worse the recession the greater the pressure for gub'ment to go on a hiring spree?

The graphs don't support that at all.

Robert|8.20.09 @ 3:34PM|#

I really, sincerely wish now that I'd geared myself toward gov't work. Teaching credentials, civil service, whatever it took.