A Public Payroll Larger Than The GDP Of Guatemala

New York City has 267,000 public employees who are paid $29 billion a year. See their hourly wages online:

New York City’s public payroll has more people than the combined populations of Albany, Hollywood and Liechtenstein. At $29 billion, it is larger than the gross domestic product of Guatemala.

Among the names on the payroll are 50 Bushes, 28 Clintons, 44 Nixons, 12 Gandhis and two Churchills. A Brando works at the housing authority, a Trump at transit and a Kissinger at design and construction.

And who knew there was a Municipal Water Finance Authority, let alone that half of the 19 people who work there are paid more than $90,000 a year?

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These and other random insights emerge from a close reading of the civil list, a 6,685-page census of 267,000 public employees that is quietly filed away each year in the city’s Records Department.

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An anachronism by modern standards of electronic recordkeeping, the list has been published by the city annually since the enactment of the civil service law in 1883, when it originally included employees’ home addresses. Since the 1960’s, the list has been filed on microfiche, and two years ago the Records Department began putting scanned images of it online.

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The civil list is so big — it dwarfs that of New York’s largest private employer, Citigroup, which has about 27,000 employees in the city — and has such a lengthy pedigree that it can fairly be said to reflect the evolution of the city itself.

“There is a racial and ethnic mosaic within the civil service that reflects the politics of the city at various points in time,” said John H. Mollenkopf, executive director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

“It’s amazing that specializations that were established 100 years ago survive today — the Irish cops, the Italians in the parks department, the Jewish names in social services,” he said. “That reflects, to some degree, the mayors who were in office at the time and what groups formed their electoral base.”

Scanning the Police and Fire Department rosters from 2005, for example, finds echoes of the Tammany era, when those agencies were well-known entry points for Irish immigrants. There are 52 McCarthys and 54 O’Connors at the Police Department, far more than at any other agency; the Fire Department has the second greatest number, with 28 and 30, respectively.