… they’re not easy to get right.

USA Today headlines today that Wisconsin is one of 41 states where public workers earn more than their private sector counterparts. According to the paper’s analysis of data from the U. S. Bureau of Economic Analysis,

State, city and school district workers earned an average of $50,774 in wages and benefits in 2009, about $1,800 more than in the private sector. The state ranked 33rd in public employee compensation among the states and Washington, D.C.

The paper’s national ranking table showed Washington public employees earning an average of $59,288, about $532 more than the private sector, and ranking 14th in public employee compensation.

It’s an imperfect comparison, as the paper acknowledges.

The analysis included full and part-time workers and did not adjust for specific jobs, age, education or experience.

Liberal critics cite another problem.

Economist Jeffrey Keefe of the liberal Economic Policy Institute says the analysis is misleading because it doesn’t reflect factors such as education that result in higher pay for public employees.

A related issue that’s not received much analysis would get into the way the heavily unionized public sector uses education as a vehicle for adjusting wage scales, almost as a flawed surrogate for performance-based compensation.

At Crosscut, Dick Lilly, a policy advisor with the City of Seattle, looks at compensation, presents a different view. He acknowledges the complexity of comparisons and notes the now-common finding that, generally, workers without college degrees do better in government than in the private sector. (There’s a floor for the education premium in the public sector.) Then he argues that the public sector does a better job of providing family-wage jobs than does the private sector and that wage disparities in government are not as great as in business. He sees both as benefits of public sector unionism.

That the higher paid public sector jobs result in higher taxes for private sector workers dealing with lower compensation in the recession gets short shrift in the Crosscut piece.

A large disparity in compensation comes in pension benefits. The New York Times today reports that the playing field may be leveling as states look into more reliance on defined contribution plans. As the article points out, there are transition costs.

We are, nonetheless, seeing transitions … in all areas of compensation.