More than nine months after it was initially supposed to be complete, the state of Alaska has released a long-overdue wage report comparing salaries for state employees to comparable jobs in the private sector and other states’ public sectors.
The report finds that more than half of state employees are paid below what has long been considered competitive under state policy. That translates to about 57% of state employees making less than the 65th percentile of their peers, a figure meant to factor in Alaska’s higher cost of living.
Legislators and state employees have been long anticipating the study, hoping that it would shine some light on its troubles recruiting and retaining employees in pretty much every sector of state government. In a prepared statement, Heidi Drygas, the director of the Alaska State Employees Association, said the results were disturbing. She noted that 83% of the job titles that have more than 100 employees in the position are below market rate.
“This study confirms what we have known for a very long time. Not only are Alaska’s state employees the only ones in the nation without a pension, salaries have fallen miserably behind,” she said. “It’s no wonder so many of our friends, neighbors, and colleagues are leaving the state and public service.”
The report has been mired in controversy, sparking tense legislative hearings and a lawsuit by the state employees’ unions. The report was supposed to be completed last summer but was delayed by the Dunleavy administration for additional work. When questioned about the scope of the additional work and the delays, the administration was vague, and an updated contract had key elements redacted when it was released to the public.
An unredacted copy of the contract was ultimately obtained and released as part of a lawsuit over the study’s release, showing that the Dunleavy administration sought to lower the target for what the state considers competitive. That meant instead of considering pay in the 65th percentile as competitive – meaning better than 65% of comparable jobs – the Dunleavy administration revised it down to the 50th percentile.
The change had the likely desired effect of downplaying Alaska’s uncompetitiveness compared to other employers, lowering the number of underpaid state employees down to 32% in the report.
The data, which includes breakdowns for everything from financial analysts to librarians, comes as the state employees’ unions are in the process of negotiating new contracts with the state. They had raised concerns that the administration was intentionally delaying the release of the contracts to undermine those negotiations.
It’s not the first time the Dunleavy administration has leaned on studies to blunt talk that Alaska’s public sector compensation isn’t competitive. In the fall of 2023, Dunleavy quashed a report by the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development because it pointed out that Alaska’s teacher pay wasn’t as competitive as it had once been. The move sparked outrage, calling into question the independence and accuracy of the information.
It was ultimately released with a different headline.
Still, the reputational damage had been done, and the effort ultimately brought more attention and scrutiny to the report than had it been released without the controversy.
As was the case with that report, it’s not clear what, if any, editing the state did to the latest wage report. At a hearing earlier this session, officials defended their continual delays of the study and indicated that they planned to make changes once the final draft was delivered by the contractor.
Drygas said in a statement that the union plans to continue its lawsuit against the state to force the release of drafts of the report to get to the bottom of what really happened with the report and whether its results paint an accurate picture of how employees are paid.
“While the release of the study is a step in the right direction, our lawsuit is still very much alive. It’s essential the State release all drafts of the study, as required by statute, for full public transparency,” Drygas said.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
