Comparing Government and Private Sector Compensation in Quebec, 2020

Main Conclusions

• Using data on individual workers from January to December 2018, this report estimates the wage differential between the government and private sectors in Quebec. It also evaluates four non-wage benefits for which data are available to quantify differences in compensation in the two sectors.
• After controlling for factors like gender, age, marital status, education, tenure, size of firm, job permanence, immigrant status, industry, occupation, and full- or part-time status, the authors found that workers in Quebec’s government sector (federal, provincial, and local) enjoyed a 9.2% wage premium, on average, over their private-sector counterparts in 2018. When the wage difference between unionized and non-unionized workers is accounted for, the wage premium for the government sector declines to 5.8%.
• The available data on non-wage benefits suggest that the government sector enjoys an advantage over the private sector. For example, 95.1% of government workers in Quebec are covered by a registered pension plan, compared to 22.0% of private-sector workers. Of those covered by a registered pension plan, 95.4% of government workers enjoyed a defined benefit pension compared to 53.8% of private-sector workers.
• In addition, government workers retire earlier than their private-sector counterparts— about 3.0 years on average—and are much less likely to lose their jobs (2.3% in the private sector compared to 0.2% in the public sector).
• Moreover, full-time workers in the government sector lost more work time in 2018 for personal reasons (16.9 days on average) than their private sector counterparts (10.2 days).