Editorial

No, Michigan Teachers Did Not Experience Pay Cuts In 2017

This one’s simple math

In a 2017 year-in-review story, MLive reporter Julie Mack implied that teacher pay in Michigan is on the decline. In the first item of the “20 things we learned from mining Michigan data in 2017” story, Mack reported that the average teacher salary fell to $61,875 in 2015-16, the fifth consecutive year it declined.

ForTheRecord says: This is a very misleading statistic promoted by teacher unions. The reality is that the pay of individual public school teachers in Michigan is based on two criteria – level of college credits obtained and years of service. When an older teacher at the upper end of the union pay scale retires and is replaced by a young teacher on the lower rungs, there is a large gap in the salaries.

For example, the highest teacher salary at the East Lansing Public Schools is $80,863. The lowest salary for a first-year teacher is $38,826. So when a veteran math teacher retires and replaced by someone just starting out, the pay for that position drops significantly even though not a single individual teacher is getting less.

In contrast, the “average teacher salary” statistic implies that individual teachers across the state are seeing significant pay cuts, which the data has shown is simply not true.

The vast majority of public school teachers in Michigan saw salary increases of some type in the past couple years. The exceptions are those veteran teachers who have reached the top of their union pay scale and teachers in the handful of Michigan school districts that have experienced severe financial peril.

Here are three real-world examples illustrating the pattern in 2017:

An Okemos Public Schools teacher saw her salary go from $43,630 in 2015-16 to $54,574 in 2016-17, a 25 percent pay raise.

A teacher at Crestwood School District saw his salary go from $58,548 in 2015-16 to $64,778 in 2016-17, a 11 percent pay hike.

A teacher at Ann Arbor Public Schools saw his salary go from $55,981 in 2015-16 to $60,343, an 8 percent increase.

Those three teachers were selected at random. Not all teachers in the state saw increases that large.

Michigan Capitol Confidential is the news source produced by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Michigan Capitol Confidential reports with a free-market news perspective.

News Story

Unlawful In Michigan To Work For Less Than $9.25/Hour

Mandated amount hiked after unions threatened to price even more workers out of jobs

The state of Michigan is one of a number of states that saw their minimum wage rise with the start of the new year. As of Monday it became unlawful in this state to employ a worker for less than $9.25 an hour.

Michigan is one of 18 states that upped their mandated pay rate on Jan. 1, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Monday’s increase was the third since September 2014, when the minimum allowable pay rate was hiked to $8.15 an hour. It was upped again to $8.50 an hour in January 2016, then to $8.90 in January 2017, according to a state website.

The previous and current increases were prescribed by 2014 legislation enacted by bipartisan vote in a Republican-controlled Legislature. The measure was introduced in response to a union-organized ballot initiative that – if supporters had collected a sufficient number of signatures and voters approved — would have increased Michigan’s mandatory minimum wage to $12 by 2022.

The state of Washington currently has the highest minimum wage in the country at $11.50 an hour.

Georgia and Wyoming are tied for having the lowest mandated minimum at $5.15 an hour, which applies only to workers not covered by a federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Five states – Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee – do not impose minimum wage mandates on employers.

Mackinac Center fiscal analyst Michael LaFaive sees the increases as bad news for lower-skilled individuals who are just entering the workforce.

"Young or inexperienced job-seekers who lack the skills needed to make it worth paying them that much are out of luck," he said. “What these laws really do is cut away the bottom rungs from the ladder that leads to a lifetime of gainful employment.”

Michigan Capitol Confidential is the news source produced by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Michigan Capitol Confidential reports with a free-market news perspective.