REPORT: CITY EMPLOYEE PAY IS OUTPACING PRIVATE SECTOR

The average New York City employee cost the city $107,000 a year in wages, health insurance, pension and other benefits in the 2008 fiscal year, an increase of 63 percent since 2000.

City worker compensation grew twice as fast as that of employees in the private sector during the same period, the Citizens Budget Commission said in the report, which was released last week. The increase was driven by contractual raises [those would be union contracts] that outpaced the inflation rate.

With the city staring at a projected $7 billion deficit by 2011, fiscal watchdogs are intensifying their calls for the Bloomberg administration to act more aggressively to control employee costs.

"These skyrocketing costs are stunning and they impose an enormous, and growing, burden on increasingly strained taxpayers. Corrective action is essential and can no longer be delayed."

Part of the reason that health benefits have jumped so much, the report said, is the city's longstanding practice, unchanged by Bloomberg, to pay 100 percent of health insurance premiums for employees and their families, as well as for retirees and their spouses.

[Government: the only sector where labor unions are actually growing]

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