The COVID-19 pandemic presented a massive crisis that demanded a large collective response. At times, strong government action—mask mandates, expanded unemployment insurance, stimulus checks, free vaccines—saved lives and livelihoods. At the same time, past underinvestment in public services exacerbated suffering as hospitals were overwhelmed, unemployment claims processing stalled, and schools struggled to adjust to remote learning. Now, thanks to federal recovery funds administered through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in 2021, state and local policymakers have substantial additional resources to invest in their communities, whether that means preparing for the next unexpected disaster or strengthening the services that help individuals and families through their own difficult times.

Investing in these services also means investing in the workers who carry them out, far too many of whom are paid low wages for their valuable work in providing public education, delivering health services and pandemic response, administering programs such as unemployment insurance, keeping our roads and sewers safe, and getting commuters to work. This blog post presents data quantifying and describing these public-sector workers and shows that Black and Latinx employees are especially likely to be paid inadequate wages.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury is encouraging states and localities to use federal recovery funds with equity in mind. To advance this goal, states and localities should invest in improving pay for their own employees who ensure social needs are met, especially lower-paid state and local employees, many of whom are women of color.

Many of the workers providing public services are paid low wages

As shown in Figure A, we estimate that 5.5 million state and local government employees are paid less than $20 an hour, accounting for about a third (32.7%) of the sector. i About 2.6 million of them, or 15.6% of the sector, are paid less than $15 an hour.

While we use $15 and $20 as cutoff points throughout this blog post to describe lower-paid state and local government workers, these should not be seen as the ceiling for policymakers. Raising wages to these levels would just be a start toward ensuring that state and local government workers are able to make ends meet, and that their pay reflects the value of their work to the communities they serve.

While there are public-sector workers who are paid inadequately in every state, there are geographic differences because states and localities make disparate investments in social services and the employees who deliver them.

Figure B shows the share and number of state and local government workers in each state whose hourly wages are below $15 and $20. The share of these workers who are paid less than $15 ranges from a low of 8.2% in Massachusetts to a remarkable high of 29.0% in Mississippi. More than one in five state and local government workers are paid less than $15 an hour in 12 additional states: Louisiana (25.5%), Oklahoma (22.8%), New Mexico (22.4%), Arkansas (22.2%), South Dakota (21.5%), Indiana (21.4%), West Virginia (21.4%), Utah (21.1%), Georgia (20.8%), Kentucky (20.6%), Alabama (20.5%), and South Carolina (20.1%). Nine of these states are in the South, where there are both high populations of Black people and predominantly white state lawmakers who refuse to raise labor standards for workers and prevent local governments from raising labor standards on their own.

Low wages are not limited to a narrow set of occupations in state and local government, although some occupations are more acutely low-wage than others. Figure C presents the shares of selected occupation groups within the state and local government workforce that are paid less than $15 and $20 an hour. Many workers providing critical services, including workers who were deemed “essential” during the start of the pandemic, remain woefully undervalued.

The majority (63.4%) of child care workers and direct care aides (personal care and nursing aides who help older adults and people with disabilities to clean, cook, and stay healthy) employed by state and local governments are paid less than $15 an hour.ii Workers in cleaning and maintenance occupations (including the janitors that keep public schools and health care facilities clean) and workers in transportation occupations (including public transit workers) are also more likely than the typical state and local government worker to be paid less than $15 an hour. About a quarter (25.9%) of office and administrative support workers are paid less than $15 an hour, despite the critical roles they play in facilitating a range of public services, from directly administering government programs to working in schools or health care. Further, most workers in each of these occupations are paid less than $20 an hour.

Among teaching assistants—many of whom faced economic precarity during school closures and now face heightened risk of COVID exposure serving a largely unvaccinated student population—two in five (40.8%) are paid less than $15 an hour, and the vast majority (71.2%) are paid less than $20 per hour. Among other education-related occupations (including librarians and preschool, kindergarten, and special education teachers), 18.6% are paid less than $15 an hour and about one-third are paid less than $20 an hour.

While teachers are less likely to be paid low wages than other state and local government workers, a good number are still subject to low pay, particularly when compared with workers in other professions with similar levels of education and experience. This long-running undervaluing of teachers has fueled staffing shortages in schools that existed long before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today, one in 10 elementary and middle school teachers are paid less than $15 an hour. Since they make up such large shares of the state and local workforce, they account for a substantial share (11.0%) of those who are paid less than $15 an hour. That any of our country’s public school teachers would be paid so little highlights how desperately public officials need to invest in the teaching workforce, if school districts are to attract and retain highly qualified educators.

Investing in public services can promote greater racial equity in pay

The public sector has long been an important employer of Black people and women. This is no coincidence. Rather, it is the result of deliberate policy choices that encouraged more equitable hiring practices. Prompted by the civil rights movement, the federal government pioneered equal opportunity and affirmative action practices during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Subsequently, state and local governments were required to adhere to federal equal opportunity provisions, and today, some even go above and beyond to institute additional affirmative action plans. This means that, all else equal, Black workers and women stand to benefit most from raising public-sector wages.

That being said, all else is not, in fact, equal. Even within state and local government, Black workers and women are more concentrated in lower-paid positions—meaning that they stand to gain even more if pay increases in the public sector prioritize lower-paid workers. As shown in Figure D, women make up 60.2% of the state and local government workforce, compared with less than half of the private sector (46.6%). Yet within state and local government, women represent an even greater share (68.7%) of workers who are paid less than $15 an hour.

Women of color are even more concentrated among the lowest paid staff. Black women make up 8.8% of the overall state and local government workforce, yet they account for 12.7% of workers paid less than $15 an hour. Nearly a quarter of Black women in state and local government (23.2%) are paid below that level, compared with 16.1% of white women. Because they are routinely marginalized in the economy, Black women should be centered, not sidelined, when state and local policymakers make economic policy decisions. This is especially true when policymakers’ decisions directly affect the Black women that keep state and local governments running. Improving economic security for Black women is necessary for dismantling the racism and sexism they face in the labor market, and to creating a more equitable economy and society for all. The public sector should be a model of those efforts.

While Latinx workers overall are underrepresented in state and local government (12.7% compared with 19.0% of the private sector), Latinx women make up a proportionate share of this workforce (7.9% compared with 8.1% of the private sector). However, like their Black colleagues, they are concentrated in lower-paid jobs, with more than one in five (22.1%) Latinx women in the state and local public sector paid less than $15 an hour. As a result, one in 10 (10.9%) state and local government workers paid less than $15 an hour is a Latinx woman.

In addition to pay raises, state and local governments can better promote equity in the workplace by protecting and promoting their employees’ ability to join a union. Coming together with their colleagues is a key source of power that enables workers to advocate for higher and more equitable wages, safer working conditions, and better benefits. Collective bargaining helps reduce pay gaps between public-sector workers and similar workers in the private sector, especially for Black and Latinx workers.

States have the money to strengthen the public sector and improve pay

The pace of recovery from the Great Recession was one of the slowest in recent U.S. economic history. As is the norm for crises, the consequences of this needlessly slow recovery were simultaneously widespread yet unequally felt. Black households, for example, did not recover their pre-recession median income for more than 10 years after the Great Recession started. This was exacerbated by inadequate federal stimulus and by some states consistently adopting harmful austerity policies that, in addition to rolling back services, severely hampered state and local government employment.

The fiscal situation in the current crisis is quite different. States have received ample support from federal legislation, including the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed in March 2020 and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) passed in March 2021. Among other support, ARPA dedicated $350 billion to help states, local, and tribal governments mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences and $122 billion more in Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief Funds (ESSER III). The Treasury Department’s final rule for the usage of the $350 billion in funds provides broad latitude and support of states prioritizing an equitable recovery.

In addition to receiving direct aid from the federal government, many states are running sizable surpluses that run counter to the staffing cuts state and local governments had made in anticipation of sizable revenue losses that never transpired. Thus, state and local government officials have ample funds at their disposal to increase pay for public employees, in addition to bolstering funding for critical public services and equity-promoting, people-centered budgets and programs. While these federal funds are a one-time investment, they can and should still be leveraged to implement wage increases that can be sustained in the long run through other revenue streams, especially in states with unexpected surpluses.

Some places are already taking steps to improve pay for their public-sector workers. In Kentucky, for example, Governor Andy Beshear initiated a 10% raise for social workers and family support specialist staff in December 2021 to help attract and retain workers. Some state lawmakers took steps to raise pay for other public-sector occupations, such as teachers or hospital workers. Others, such as Missouri Governor Mike Parsons and the Florida State Senate, proposed raising the wage floor for all state employees to $15 an hour, although the final Missouri budget ultimately left it up to individual departments to decide.

Investments in public services should also reflect equity goals

Investing in better pay for state and local government workers will foster greater racial and gender equity, since many of these workers are women of color. It is also an important mechanism for bolstering the public services that state and local government workers provide. New desks and textbooks are a good use of public funds, but raising wages for school staff is also a direct investment in education. A new fleet of buses is one component of a more accessible and greener transit system, but the workers driving them are also worthy of investment.

At the same time, which public investments to make, like any policy decisions, can never truly be “race neutral.” When weighing which public services to invest in, policymakers should prioritize those that will lift up communities of color, women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups. Additionally, they should be sure to involve those groups in the decision-making process. This is particularly key where state and local spending has been complicit in harm to communities of color, especially Black communities. Federal funds provide a chance for state and local lawmakers to reverse course and build up communities by investing in proven approaches to safety, health, prosperity, and equity and by valuing the public employees who do that work.

i. Unless otherwise noted, our descriptions of the state and local government workers use data from 2019 and 2021 to provide estimates that balance representing our current labor market and the pre-pandemic (and, presumably, post-pandemic) typical state and local government workforce. Values are in 2021 dollars.

ii. The estimates by occupation use 2019 data.