Mostly True:

Sometimes it’s actually been more, but other times, a good deal less.

PolitiFact checks Don Zimmerman’s statement that unlike city employees, the salaries of other Austin workers “have not been going up 3 percent a year.”

Austin City Council Member Don Zimmerman objected to a 3 percent pay raise for Austin city employees partly by saying other Austin residents haven’t landed similar increases.

An American-Statesman news story posted online Sept. 1 quoted Zimmerman, the District 6 City Council member, telling colleagues that Austin residents who aren’t city employees face the same taxes, fees and utility bills that the employees confront. “And,” Zimmerman said, “their salaries have not been going up 3 percent a year for the last several years.”

In recent years, city employees actually fifielded raises ranging from 1.5 percent to 3.5 percent; the council gave no raises in the 2009-10 budget year. Days after Zimmerman piped up, the council voted 9-2, with Zimmerman voting “no,” for a 2015-16 budget that includes 3 percent raises for the city’s 12,000 workers.

We embarked on this fact check with some wariness. Outside of government, which is subject to open-records laws, who knows about anyone else’s pay?

With guidance from expert number-crunchers, we landed several federal estimates for average changes in overall wages paid Austin-area workers, though we didn’t identify data strictly limited to people working in Austin.

To get started, we asked Zimmerman how he reached his conclusion. He put us in touch with his chief of staffffffffffff,

Joe Petronis, who emailed a spreadsheet drawing on Occupational Employment Statistics collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that include wage estimates for over 800 occupations nationally and, closer to home, metropolitan statistical areas.

Petronis focused on changes in median hourly wages across all occupations (including city workers) in the region from May 2010 to May 2014. These data suggest the 2012 hourly median of $17.12 in the Austin region was down 0.5 percent from the 2011 median of $17.20. In 2013, per the Occupational Employment Statistics, the $17.48 in median hourly wages was up 2.1 percent from the year before, and the 2014 median hourly wage of $17.62 was up 0.8 percent from the 2013 median, all figures we confirmed on a Bureau of Labor Statistics website.

That’s one way of ball-parking wage changes. Then again, Beverly Kerr, a lead researcher for the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, pointed out by email that the government counsels against using occupational employment data to compare figures from different years. “This is not the best data set to use to compare the changes in wages over time,” Kerr wrote.

Yet Cheryl Abbot, a Dallas-based Bureau of Labor Statistics spokeswoman, told us that while the statistics and another bureau data set, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, aren’t intended for use as “a time series,” top line pay-change comparisons we were considering made the caveats less worrisome.

It turned out there are many ways to attempt wage-change comparisons.

Kerr and Abbot each said the bureau’s quarterly census would be the most comprehensive way to gauge pay changes among workers not employed by the city. The census tracks employment and wages of establishments that report to the federal government’s unemployment insurance programs, hence representing about 97 percent of the nation’s civilian wage and salary civilian employment.

Abbot sent us a chart showing, per the quarterly census, 10 years of changes in average weekly wages for people working in Travis County, enabling us to calculate that wages for individuals employed in the county, including city employees, esca- lated an average of nearly 3 percent a year from 2010 through 2014. This figure rolled in changes in wages for city employees and other government workers. But it’s also possible to isolate changes in wages solely for local government workers, including city employees, which the census indicates increased an average of nearly 2 percent a year. According to the chart, average wages for private-sector workers employed in the county rose an average 2.7 percent a year over the five years.

And, in keeping with Zimmerman’s claim, what of the last several years? Wages for all workers in the county escalated an average 3.1 percent in 2012, 1.1 percent in 2013 and 4.2 percent in 2014, according to the bureau’s census. Meanwhile, private-sector wages went up 3.3 percent on aver- age in 2012; decreased 0.2 percent in 2012; and increased 3.9 percent in 2014, Abbot’s chart indicated.

Kerr offered up another data source overseen by the bureau, its Current Employment Statistics, which Kerr tapped to find that annual private industry wages increased in the five-county region by an average of 2.2 percent from 2008 through 2014 with average annual raises ranging from 1.3 percent to 4.8 percent. Most recently, average wages were up 1.1 percent in 2012; increased 3.2 percent in 2013; and rose 4.1 percent in 2014, Kerr’s chart indicates.

When we asked, Abbot called the survey-based Current Employment Statistics a “perfectly valid choice” for gauging wage changes. But we couldn’t make a run at checking changes in median wages per the quarterly census or those statistics. Abbot said those data sets don’t produce median figures.

Our ruling

Zimmerman said the salaries of Austin residents who don’t work for city government “have not been going up 3 percent a year for the last several years.”

By various indicators, wages of Austin-area workers haven’t gone up 3 percent every year, as Zimmerman said. Yet some measures suggest there were some 3 percent (or better) average increases, though we also found evidence of an average wage decline one recent year.

We rate Zimmerman’s statement, which lacked these clarifications, Mostly True.