A new report finds “persistent dissatisfaction” among St. Louis’ employees with their pay and other parts of working for the city.
Mayor Cara Spencer on Tuesday released the results of a study that looked at salary, benefits and the general human resources structure of the city.
“We should pay competitively,” Spencer said. “St. Louis employees are driven, of course, by a desire to serve our community, but paying competitively certainly helps us bring in the best folks at the front end.”
Work began on the report in August 2024. It found salary ranges for almost all civil service employees were lower than their peers in similar public and private-sector jobs. The gap was largest at the bottom of the pay scale.
“Many feel that their pay does not reflect their responsibilities, experience, or the market value of their work,” Evergreen Solutions, the Florida-based consulting firm contracted to do the study, wrote in its report. “The city’s current pay structure and progression system were perceived as outdated, slow-moving, and insufficiently responsive to inflation, performance, or internal equity.”
The results came as no surprise to the administration, said Benjamin Jonsson, Spencer’s director of operations.
“We know how hard our city employees work, that they're committed to the city of St. Louis. They've got some tough jobs, and we want them to be paid a fair wage,” he said.
The city set $10 million aside in the current budget to implement mid-year pay adjustments. Jonsson said negotiations with the unions will focus on three key areas.
First he said, minimum salaries for entry-level, non-public safety employees will be raised to match the market rate in the study, affecting about 600 people.
“We’ve really struggled to attract talent in some key departments, some service delivery departments, and that's where this is really going to have the biggest impact,” Spencer said.
For example, the study found that an entry-level employee in the Forestry Division makes almost 30% below the market minimum. A forestry supervisor makes more than 70% below that minimum, an entry-level plumber about 75% percent below, and a new heavy equipment operator about 60% below.
And while the city’s benefits package, especially its retirement, compares favorably to its peers in the public and private sector, many early-career workers do not plan to stay with a single employer their entire working lives.
All other general employees – about 3,800 – will get some kind of increase on top of 1.5% merit raises. Finally, the city will boost the entire pay scale for the St. Louis Fire Department.
Jonsson said he expected negotiations with the unions to take about 30 days, with legislation coming after the Board of Aldermen returns from its winter break in January. He hopes the raises will take effect in February.
“The city knows they need to step up in order to get a properly-compensated workforce,” said Jason Spieckerman, the business representative of Carpenter’s Local 1596. “How we get there is still kind of the question.”
He said Spencer was more open to a dialogue with the unions representing the city workforce, making him “a little more optimistic this go-around.”
The city’s Budget and Public Employees Committee will get its own update on the pay study on Wednesday.
Jonsson said the city will also work to move its non-public safety employees away from a “step” plan in which pay increases every year along a fixed grid and toward a system in which a person can be hired at a range of salaries. Changing that system, the report found, would give the city more flexibility in hiring and address concerns about transparency.
The city last launched a pay study in 2019. A draft of the report released in 2021 focused solely on pay and contained recommendations that would have cost $22 million a year to fully implement. A spokesman for the personnel department, which handles compensation matters, said there had been concern about the validity of the data collected, and he believed the report had been regarded as incomplete and therefore tabled.
Spencer said she was committed to implementing the recommendations in the 2024 study.
This pay study will not be sitting on a shelf,” she said, adding that the city plans to conduct them regularly.
“Experts really recommend doing these pay studies on a regular basis, every three to five years,” she said. “We're going to see inflation and things of that nature. And as rates adjust, we will be adjusting with them.”
This story has been updated with comments from Mayor Cara Spencer.
