Excessive teachers’ wages a boondoggle we can’t ignore
Which group of 70,000 Ontario civil servants is paid slightly more than $78 per hour?
To put it in perspective, the average Canadian aerospace engineer earns about half of this, at $40 per hour; veterinarians $38; civil engineers $37; HR specialists $28; Web designers and developers $25; and journalists, I am afraid to say, just $24, less than one-third of this group.
So which group of public employees must Ontario taxpayers be so generous toward?
Let me provide some hints. Relative to these earnings, this position requires modest education, limited qualifications, there is relatively weak competition to obtain entrance, it has limited barriers to entry and its members enjoy an unparalleled lifestyle (even apart from their wages).
The answer: teachers.
My figure is based upon information provided by the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario as to the required minimum days worked per year, hours per day and average annual remuneration. Elementary teachers make up more than 70,000 of the 114,000 teachers. The rest are secondary school teachers, whose average hourly wage for the time they are required to work, based on more limited information from the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, is the still surprisingly high sum of $68.73.
Teachers may protest that they work much longer hours than what is required by their collective agreements. That is undoubtedly true for many. But employees in other vocations similarly take work home. And, in terms of the necessity to perform additional work, preparation time is already negotiated into teachers’ collective agreements as part of their required minimum work day.
The point is that teachers, like other civil servants, are not required to work longer than the amounts negotiated for them by their unions. Once they have taught the same courses for a certain number of years, many likely feel no need to, particularly since their collective agreements make it virtually impossible to fire them for weak pedagogical skills.
Although I note a simple hourly wage of $78, teachers’ real wages are much higher. First, there are the gold-plated civil service benefits. Then the sick days they can accumulate and be paid out for up to six months wages. But most important, after a combination of age and years of service totalling 85, teachers as early as 55 can retire and be paid 60% of their salary for life. And they can earn this while working somewhere else.
This makes their effective hourly rate exceed $100 per hour. No such luck for aerospace engineers (or journalists).
You may think it a brazen display of chutzpah for a lawyer to be talking about anyone else’s excessive hourly wages. But let’s look at my profession. A mid-level downtown Toronto lawyer may charge $450 per hour but, as a rule of thumb, has to work close to two hours for every hour docketed. That’s why Bay Street firms may expect their juniors to work 70 hour weeks but have weekly docketing goals of only 35 hours. (Most employers in my profession who tout work-life balance in their recruitment are being disingenuous.)
That knocks the $450 rate down to an effective $225, but out of that $225 lawyers must pay for receptionists, law clerks, legal secretaries, office space, expensive equipment, etc. They are required by the Law Society to take courses each year to upgrade their skills. Unlike teachers, they do so on their own unpaid time. They also have to find additional time to secure and retain clients and incur entrepreneurial risk, particularly in difficult times. Many Ontario lawyers take home less than $50,000 per year. They also have no pension.
Teachers are employees and have neither expenses nor the risk of not being paid. I hardly need add that lawyers have several additional years of more rigorous education before they earn anything and dramatically tougher entrance requirements.
Extrapolating $78 dollars per hour to a 40-hour work amounts to a salary of $162,240 per annum. With the additional amount represented by the value of the 60% lifetime pension, it would be more than $200,000.
How would you compare the qualifications and accomplishments of the average Ontarian with that income relative to the average Ontario teacher? Should equally qualified taxpayers be paying teachers vastly more than they earn themselves?
Teachers’ earnings are a telling commentary on the anti-competitive role of governments and unions. In a free enterprise society, one would think this combination of wages and lifestyle would attract among the best and the brightest. Instead, parents who can afford it (and many who really can’t) are vacating the school system in droves, paying upwards of $29,000 per year, per child, to send their children to private schools where the teachers often don’t earn as much as those in public schools. Obviously, private schools have to do a much better job to attract students who could go to the public school system, usually closer to their homes, for free. But few private school teachers are unionized and teachers will be fired if they do not perform.
Hand it to the unions, particularly in the public sector. They have negotiated wages, benefits and pensions for this group vastly in excess of their qualifications. There may be many great teachers. But should they be paid $78 per hour?
Premier Dalton McGuinty is trying to freeze Ontario teachers’ wages because the province cannot afford this continued boondoggle. Taxpayers should be jumping on board.
The most meaningful way to reduce taxes is to equalize the wages of our civil servants with comparably qualified private sector employees. Although there has been much talk of this, the battle has not yet been joined. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford said he would do that, but when the union offered to take a three-year wage freeze, instead of agreeing to or asking for actual cuts, he responded with a generous increase over four years.
Premier McGuinty is promising to take on the public sector unions. Perhaps this needed battle will finally be joined.
Howard Levitt is senior partner of Levitt LLP, employment and labour lawyers. He practises employment law in eight provinces and is author of The Law of Hiring in Canada.
http://business.financialpost.com/2...achers-wages-are-a-boondoggle-we-cant-afford/
