'Minimum Wage' of $100,000 for 50,000 Highly Compensated Illinois Public Employees Costs Taxpayers $8.0 Billion
Forbes 'Editors Pick' | Read our Forbes column here
May 20, 2016
Nearly 2,500 units of Illinois government pay
at least one employee $100,000
Illinois is broke. Yesterday at Forbes, we proved why.
Our column was a Forbes 'Editors Pick' and with over 60,000 views online. It trended #2 'Most Popular' on the prestigious news site.
An exclusive club of 50,000 public employees with $100,000 salaries in nearly every IL hometown was 'hiding' in our salary data at OpenTheBooks.com. We opened the books.
You paid for this. So, we show you all of the gory details on our interactive mapping tool at OpenTheBooks.com. Start your search
here, zoom-in, click any 'pin,' and scroll down to review the results.
If you live in
Florida or
Texas, we mapped your 'highly compensated' public employees as well.
Click here and use the drop-down arrow to choose the title of your map.
You'll be amazed at what you'll discover. Here's a quick sample of what we found in Illinois:
- 18,900 teachers and school administrators - including $503,200 for Mohsin Dada, an administrator at North Shore School District 112 who earned $248,510 salary, plus a teacher's retirement pension of $254,700 (ZIP - 60035).
- 9,000 college and university employees - including Dr. Fady Toufic Charbel at the University of Illinois at Chicago who earned $1.38 million (ZIP - 60601).
- 8,838 State of Illinois employees - including Steven Valasek, a $218,519 'contractual worker' employed by Illinois Comptroller Leslie Munger (R) (ZIP - 62704).
- 5,122 small-town city and village employees - including 72 municipal managers who out-earn every governor of the 50 states at $180,000 per year.
- 5,007 City of Chicago rank-and-file managers and workers - including $216,000 for embattled Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D).
In total, there's roughly $9.3 billion in total compensation flowing to highly compensated government workers when counting 7,637 federal employees based in Illinois with six-figure salaries.
So, after the Chicago pension funds or the Illinois Teacher's Retirement System runs out of money... what are you going to say to a federal bailout?