Philadelphia will commission a study of its pay scale amid city government staffing struggles

Philadelphia will hire an outside firm to study its pay scale for government employees as the city struggles to attract candidates to fill thousands of job vacancies.

The city will spend up to $200,000 on a review they hope will be completed by the middle of next year. Officials are soliciting proposals from consultants, and work on the study is expected to begin by the end of the year once a firm is selected.

Once chosen, the firm will assess the city’s competitiveness as an employer by reviewing city jobs and comparing the pay with similar jobs in other jurisdictions or sectors.

Philadelphia’s municipal government has long been one of the largest employers in the region, with more than 26,000 people on the payroll. But city workers from police officers to librarians have resigned or retired in droves amid the pandemic, leaving some one in seven jobs unfilled this year.

The staffing problem has touched most every department in the city and complicated the delivery of basic services, including operating jails, inspecting buildings, and answering 911 calls.

» READ MORE: How short staffing across Philadelphia city government affects you

Amid the wave of departures, the pandemic brought on a changed labor market, shifts in the economy, and a national worker shortage. The private sector attracted government employees by offering remote work, flexible hours, and signing bonuses.

But critics say the city’s structured pay plan has been less responsive to trends and ultimately made it harder for the city to attract civil service workers — those who are not generally affected by changes in elected leadership — who make up about 80% of the workforce. They include police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, parks employees, and thousands of others.

While the city routinely reviews pay for individual job classifications, officials could not recall the last time Philadelphia engaged an outside firm to undertake a large-scale review of its pay plan.

The outside firm will not review every position in the civil service pay plan, which includes minimum and maximum pay rates for all classifications of workers in the civil service

Instead, it will identify “key benchmark positions” that can be used to easily match against pay data from outside the city or in other sectors. The firm also may review some exempt positions, including in the city’s Law Department, which has been particularly short-staffed and has struggled to fill vacancies.

» READ MORE: Philadelphia libraries are struggling to stay open and short hundreds of workers

City spokesperson Joy Huertas declined to specify how many positions will be reviewed, saying, “We will be meeting with various internal stakeholders to finalize the scope and positions we will focus on.”

Leaders of the unions that represent municipal workers, which negotiate salaries and benefits for their membership, say the city’s wages are no longer competitive with large swaths of the private sector.

Bret Coles, a spokesperson for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 33, which represents mostly blue-collar municipal workers, said the union “absolutely welcomes the study.”

“We know that our members are grossly underpaid,” he said. “We already know what it’s going to reveal. Whether or not that’s going to change anything is the bigger question.”