Let’s talk about classes. Not a school or college class, nor the type of felony under state Penal Law. Rather, your Editorial Team wants to talk about socioeconomic classes.

Human beings establishing hierarchies among themselves has been going on for so long and is so widespread that we think we can classify (sorry) the phenomenon as part of the hardwiring of the human condition. One need only look to the other classic “Great Apes” — chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans — to find that ordering ourselves into classes is a thing we Hominidae do. (Not so much the orangutans, though. They’re actually pretty chill and prefer, like so many of us these days, a “semi-solitary” existence. Expanding the great apes classification, as many do now, to include bonobos … well, you know how they roll.)

Here in Ulster County, we have plenty of classes all along the scale from the super-rich to the hyper-broke. We haven’t had a king or any other kind of inheritable nobility since the 1770s, but we do have the bourgeoisie, the petit bourgeoisie and plenty of the proletariat.

Parse that as you will, armchair economists. We want to talk about a subset of the local population which has formed a class all their own: government employees. We also want to talk about the implications of this relatively recent development in New York State history for the rest of us.

Let’s cut to the chase. From the workers’ perspective, government jobs at pretty much any level (including working for local school districts) offer more money and far better benefits than the private sector. While that’s good for them individually and, it can be argued, good for the local economy as a whole to have a well-paid segment of the population pumping money into it, it does something else. It puts local businesses at a critical disadvantage in competing for employees in our current tight labor market.

That’s ironic, considering the way our politicians fall all over themselves to heap praise and support upon local businesses. But your Editorial Team suspects this: The effects of government attracting Ulster’s best and brightest away from local businesses is so damaging that any support, moral or material, that government can provide said local businesses can’t make up for it. Good workers are hard to find these days. The competition is fierce and sometimes feelings get hurt. We know of an incident where a local businessman who just lost a quality employee to another local business threatened, in a jocular way, to break the legs of the employee’s new boss if the employee was mistreated.

Last week, County Comptroller March Gallagher released her office’s Public Pay Dashboard update, which includes 2023 salary figures for all Ulster County government employees. (For salary, benefits and pension data on school district and local government employees, go to SeeThroughNY.net. For those younger readers who may be unfamiliar with the term “pension,” that’s when your former employer JUST GIVES you money after you stop working for them. For the rest of your life! Can you believe it?)

It’s easy to just list the top few employees and how much they make, but we think a more telling exercise is this: See how long it takes you to scroll down to who’s supposed to be on the top of the Ulster heap, County Executive Jen Metzger. It takes a long, long time to get to her $148K-plus salary. Kudos for her donating a decent chunk of it, some $7,200, every year to a SUNY Ulster scholarship fund. But she must have misspoken when she said ex-SJ publisher Amberly Jane Campbell was no longer working for us when she hired her as her communications chief. Amberly was most definitely working for us when Metzger, offering a salary that no local journalism outfit can come close to matching, hired her away from the Shawangunk Journal. Not that we’re keeping score, but the county has now taken two excellent women journalists off the board: Amberly and Hillary Harvey.

Let’s look at the numbers. The county website’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages page lends data to our suppositions. In 2022, as recent as that dashboard is as of now, 5,467 private establishments in Ulster County employed over that year an average of 44,435 workers at an average salary of $50,293. In 2021 — the dashboard didn’t have 2022 info in this category — 234 government establishments employed over that year an average of 12,280 workers at an average salary of $74,991.

We don’t have to tell you that your living experience is much better when you make $75K a year as opposed to $50K a year. The latter is basically a paycheck-to-paycheck existence while the former makes it a lot easier to save and invest money, and lead a far less stressful life.

Comptroller Gallagher’s quarterly financial reports offer a lot of good information. The most recent is for the third quarter (Q3) of 2023; we’re looking at the “Employment by Sector” table. The data is a little blurred — the largest sector is “Educational and Health Services” at 9,300. How many of those 9,300 work for public school districts isn’t clear, but let’s say for argument’s sake that it’s 33.3 percent, which yields a SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess) figure of 3,100. Add that 3,100 to the local government’s 8,800, state government’s 4,600 and the federal government’s 400 yields 16,900. Dividing that number by the 60,000 total jobs in Ulster and multiplying that figure by 100 reveals that 28 percent of county jobs are taxpayer funded.

There we have it, folks. IBM never needed to come back at all. Our government in its myriad facets has made itself a Big Blue-scale employer, drawing on seemingly endless resources to provide the best-compensated jobs in town. Which has both created a large class of wealthy people and made it very difficult for local small businesses to pay enough to keep its workers from moving into that class.

But what does it say about the economy of Ulster County that the best-compensated jobs in town are not connected to market forces but paid for by people whose destinies are determined by those same forces? Nothing good, we’re afraid. It’s a system that may go on for a long time, but at some point, somebody’s going to run out of money to pay for it all.