Philly A Hub For Government Workers

Money changes happening now in the public sector will have a big impact on Philadelphia, which has many government workers on various payrolls.

Governments are putting pressure on public workers to cut or change policies that guarantee a defined return on pensions, low-cost health-care contributions and some annual raises.

Last night, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and two top unions agreed on a temporary pay freeze, followed by restored waged hikes. Health-care and pensions weren't part of the deal.

But across the river, Gov. Chris Christie pushed through an historic change in New Jersey's state-worker compensation system, making workers pay much more for health care.

Both states face big pension deficits because they guarantee a return to many government workers through defined-benefit pensions.

In all, there are 349,000 people in all government jobs in the greater Philadelphia-South Jersey-Delaware area, out of 2.7 million workers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said in May 2011 that 16.3 percent of workers in the city of Philadelphia, about 104,000 people, worked for local, state and federal government offices.

The city had about 26,470 employees on its head count in the most-recent quarterly managers' report, including jobs paid for outside of general funds.

The Philadelphia school district has another 24,000 employees, while SEPTA has about 9,000 employees.

Out in the suburbs, another 116,000 government workers were in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties in May 2011.

An additional 81,000 were on government payrolls in central and South New Jersey, with 48,000 government workers in Delaware.

In the long term, workers in the city of Philadelphia will feel the heat, because so many public workers live in the city.

Another different study shows there are more than 116,000 education workers in Philadelphia and its four neighboring Pennsylvania counties. More than half the workers were in secondary schools.

Data from 2008 also show there were 71,000 people in the city of Philadelphia in the educational sector.

Unions representing all government workers will play in a big role in Pennsylvania, where public sector union membership stands at 49.9 percent (the national average is 36 percent).

A national 2007 BLS survey found that 95 percent of state and local government workers in unions had defined-benefit pensions, compared with 21 percent for nonunion workers.