Government salary increases for high-level positions in the Government of the Virgin Islands (GVI) have been in the news recently, with a total of $349,000 in total salary increases slated to take effect. But who makes up the other end of the salary spectrum? Who are those GVI employees with low enough salaries to force even further questions about the appropriateness of these salary increases? For this analysis, these employees are called the “Under 30Ks” because this is a look at those GVI employees whose salaries are less than $30,000 per year.
When using data for analyses, it is important to ensure your data are clean. This refers to the process of addressing (with documentation) entries that are unusable, like those that are missing or incorrect. For this piece, 82 entries (employees) were removed from the dataset because they were either missing salaries (4 entries) or outliers under $27,040 (78 entries), with a remaining dataset of 5,348 GVI employees.
Of that, 418 employees make less than $30,000, or 8% of all GVI employees.
In some ways, the $30,000 cut-off point is arbitrary. It is a round dollar figure recognizable as being toward the lower end of government salaries. Arbitrary as it may be, however, it is close enough to the most recent USVI living wage to be useful. The USVI Bureau of Economic Research determined that a childless adult requires $28,496 annually (with benefits) to meet their basic needs in the territory.
Typically, a data-driven piece like this would pull in more data from other sources, such as the 2020 Census, Federal poverty levels, or even pension and benefits data that shows the additional cost of these pay raises. But this analysis is almost as much about the Under 30Ks as it is about data itself.
Data is a tool used in telling a story, but it is not the story itself. Indeed, the report by the VI Public Official Compensation Commission is full of data that seemingly justifies these raises. However, all data-driven policymaking is not equal because not all data are good data, and even good data is not always complete. After all, the people’s pain is data, too, and that’s hardly ever captured cleanly in a database – though some get close.
The VI Department of Personnel Employee Database was first published several years ago in a print newspaper. It was considered a source of “melee” (or “bam”) at the time. But melee is context. Melee is data. And instead of just discussing who makes how much money, that same melee will now be used to paint a picture – incomplete as it may be – of some of our most vulnerable.
These are the key findings of the analysis:
- The estimated total to bring all GVI employees’ salaries up to $30,000 is $881,725.09. This is just 2.5 times the total cost of the salary increase for government officials.
- The average salary for these employees is $27,891, or about $600 less than the estimated USVI living wage. More strikingly, 76% of all Under 30Ks—319 employees—make less than this living wage.
- 47% of employees in the Department of Sports, Parks, and Recreation (DSPR) make less than $30,000 annually, making DSPR the department with the highest concentration of this group of employees.
- With only one (1) employee out of 71 under $30,000, the Department of Property and Procurement (P&P) has the lowest concentration of employees within that group. The Department of Labor, the Lt. Governor’s Office, and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) each have three (3) employees in that category.
- Of the 418 GVI employees with salaries less than $30,000, 241 have the words “Custodial,” “Food,” or “Cook” in their title. That means custodial workers and kitchen staff make up 58% of all employees under $30K.
It is important to note that while this is an example of how data may be used for policy recommendations, this analysis is not itself a policy recommendation. Raising all salaries under $30,000 may sound like a straightforward solution, and it could even be a step toward a broader goal of fairer wages. Still, such a change could come with unintended consequences, like shifts in eligibility for federal housing assistance or other income-based benefits. That is beyond the scope of this analysis.
This does not negate the argument that public officials ought to be paid more. This analysis is not meant to provide any clarity on that question. What is abundantly clear, however, is that a reshuffling of priorities might be in order. With that many employees not even making a living wage, it is challenging to justify salary increases that do not target them first.
For the spreadsheet and data used for this analysis, please reach out to Biko McMillan at biko.mcmillan@gmail.com.
—Biko McMillan is a policy and data analyst who, in his spare time, is the CEO and Founder of Yellow Cedar Consulting, LLC. He is a young thinker constantly trying to envision a better Virgin Islands.
Editor’s Note: Opinion articles do not represent the views of the Virgin Islands Source newsroom and are the sole expressed opinion of the writer. Submissions can be made to visource@gmail.com.
