Federal work is an anchor in many local economies, offering security and benefits increasingly rare in the private sector and a route to the middle class.
Verla Bloomfield has the kind of workplace that seems plucked from a different era. She has a pension, a union, several weeks of vacation and a paycheck that has nearly doubled in 14 years. Her employer? The United States government.
“People used to work for companies their whole life and retire and take their pension and move on,” said Ms. Bloomfield, who handles claims for the Social Security Administration in Tulsa, Okla. “That’s not the reality of our work force anymore, but it still is for the federal government.”
By many measures, the last couple of decades scorched American workers. Wages crawled up, factory jobs fled to China and benefits collapsed. But those years look less painful if you worked for Uncle Sam.
Since 2000, average pay has grown twice as fast for federal employees as it has in the private sector. That’s partly because the federal work force has become more educated and specialized. It is also built into the job. Even without the salaries that top performers can command in the corporate world, government workers who do well are entitled by law to regular pay increases, an increasingly rare guarantee elsewhere.
“It has been a really key route to the middle class,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “These are jobs in a highly unionized sector, where people see decent benefits, decent job security, decent wage growth over time.”
While raises have slowed in recent years, these jobs are still often the best around. Eight in 10 are outside of the Beltway. And the paychecks — which have stopped arriving during the longest United States government shutdown ever — are increasingly critical to local economies.
That is especially true in places that are remote and have high jobless rates, like Pocahontas County, W. Va. “Natural resources abound, but job opportunities don’t,” said Cynthia Sandeno, a district ranger with the United States Forest Service, who oversees hundreds of thousands of acres of woodlands in the area.
Ms. Sandeno, 44, manages 25 wildlife ecologists, biologists, engineers and foresters who make anywhere from $28,000 to $100,000 a year, which puts many of them at the top of the local pay scale. Their missing checks will very likely be felt far beyond their own bank accounts.
Ms. Sandeno says that since they were furloughed, her staff members stopped eating out at the Dirtbean cafe or Rayetta’s Lunch Box in Marlinton, a town of 1,000.
