Every single government employee and their family/friends vote in local elections, and other people do not. You will not win an election without their votes, and you can use opaque compensation like DB pensions and whatnot to hide and punt forward the costs of the compensation.
You will never find a non taxpayer funded entity promise something like this:
>After 30 years of service, LA lifeguards can retire as young as 55 on 79-percent of their pay.
Go ask an insurance company how much an annuity for even $80k would cost starting at age 55 until death. It would be $1M+.
Social Security averages out your earnings for your whole lifetime to calculate the benefit, and that is with the power of the federal government. City and state governments regularly promise employees final average 1, 3, 5, and at best 10 pay formulas. So you see cops/firefighters/lifeguards/etc spiking their overtime and working 80 hours per week for the last few years, doubling and tripling their DB pension benefit.
And you simply will not see this outside of taxpayer funded entities.
Another part of the challenge is overtime -- it ends up costing a lot to pay out time-and-a-half on an already fat paycheck. I think we should figure out some binding pre-commitment to forbid or at least minimize regular overtime. Something like "if > 50% of one employee's worth of overtime is required a new role must be opened instead of paying overtime".
I understand that unions like OT for their members (of course they would!) but as an employer it's insane to be handing it out as regularly as government employees get it.
No, I think it is still too complicated of an issue to burden voters with understanding. The better solution would be restricting all employer employee compensation arrangements to cash only.
That would solve politicians being able to pay with unaccounted for benefits that become a burden decades later, and increase labor price transparency and result in better functioning markets once employers are out of the health/vision/dental/public transport/retirement benefit business.
And a third bird it kills is reducing the advantage big businesses have over small businesses.
These waterfront lifeguards have a lot more in common with EMTs and firefighters than have with the teenager who watches septagenarians do laps at your local pool, and they're compensated as such.
No CEO or programmer dies in the line of duty, yet you can't throw a rock on this site without hitting thkse kinds of compensation.
Exactly, the average techbro's output working at a FAANG company likely ruins more lives than the average lifeguard saves. The compensation is clearly just.
