Public Sector Wage Growth in Alberta
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11575/sppp.v5i0.42372Abstract
In recent years, Alberta’s fiscal stance has shifted from large surpluses to deficits, and a large part of the blame appears to be due to rising public sector salaries. Since 2000, the province’s public sector wage bill has shot up by 119 percent — almost double the rate of growth in the rest of Canada. Wages, previously roughly at par with the rest of the country, are now higher (in many cases very substantially) across all public sector categories, including health care, social services, education and government, consuming 95 percent of the increase in provincial revenues over the past decade. At the same time, the number of public sector employees has grown faster than the overall population; it is difficult to attribute this sharp uptick to a rise in productivity, or the need to compete with private industry for skilled workers. This paper breaks down the increases in every category, arguing that if the provincial government is looking to trim expenditures, public sector salaries are a good place to start. The authors make their case using detailed Statistics Canada data, throwing down the gauntlet to defenders of the status quo and challenging them to justify these disparate increases.References
Boessenkool, Ken. Does Alberta Have a Spending Problem? (Calgary, School of Public Policy, February 2010).
Ducket, Stephen, Alberta’s Health Spending Challenge (Edmonton, Institute for Public Economics, Presentation to conference on 7 May 2010, Boom and Bust Again: Policy Challenges for a CommodityBased Economy, found at http://www.ipe.ualberta.ca/en/EventsandSeminars/~/media/ipe/ConferencesAndLectures/BoomAndBust/ Healthcare-Expenditures-IPE-70510.pdf on January 4, 2011)
Eisen, Ben. Public Administration Wage Growth: Comparing Wage Growth in Industries Across the Canadian Economy (Winnipeg: Frontier Centre for Public Policy, January 2011)
Eisen, Ben. Canada Health Consumer Index 2011 (Winnipeg: Frontier Centre for Public Policy, December 2011)
Laurin, Alexandre and William B.P. Robson. A Faster Track to Fiscal Balance: The 2011 Shadow Budget (Toronto: CD Howe Institute, February 2011).
Missouri Economic Research and Information Centre, NAICS Sectors (http://www.missourieconomy.org/about_us/naics_sect.stm accessed on September 10, 2010).
Mueller, Richard M. “Public- and Private-Sector Wages Revisited,” Industrial Relations, 29(3), 275-400.
Statistics Canada, Cansim, Various data series as noted in the text.
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