Kentucky’s public workforce is being pushed to its breaking point, with executive-branch agencies alone hemorrhaging about 20% of their workers over the past decade due to wage and benefit cuts, a recent analysis from the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy shows.

According to KyPolicy, as the gap between public and private-sector pay widens, it’s imperiling the workforce that provides basic government guarantees like education, child protection services and the constitutional right to legal representation.

“The important thing that folks should realize is that all the important services that we take for granted … all of those are dependent on our state workforce,” said Dustin Pugel, a policy analyst with KyPolicy who co-authored the report with Pam Thomas.

“If we care about the public services that we say we do, then we need to care about the public servants” who provide them, Pugel told the Daily News.

The KyPolicy analysis said state workers have seen their wages fall by 4% on average in inflation-adjusted dollars since the start of the Great Recession in 2008.

It said state employees have only actually received two modest pay raises in the past dozen years, despite state law mandating 5% increases annually for all state employees.

Figures from the state’s Personnel Cabinet show there were some 30,000 executive, judicial and legislative branch employees as of November 2021. They made an average salary of $45,040.

At the same time, the state has asked them to pay more for reduced health care and pension benefits, pushing workers to the comparatively more attractive private sector, where the average annual salary has increased by an inflation-adjusted 13% since 2008.

All this has fed into a staff shortage of government workers, with about one in five positions left open, Pugel said.

This was felt perhaps most keenly in the state’s unemployment office, which was left with only a dozen people to answer phones when the coronavirus pandemic put one in three Kentuckians out of a job in 2020, Pugel said.

“That created an immense amount of frustration,” he said.

But the problems are continuing, especially for the most vulnerable Kentuckians.

High caseloads and low pay for state social workers have left Kentucky with about 1,000 fewer caseworkers than it needs.

In 2021, for example, there was an exodus of 650 caseworkers. By June of that same year, 44% of social workers in the Department for Community Based Services had less than one year of experience.

However, with a $3.5 billion budget surplus this year, Kentucky lawmakers have an opportunity to address the issues, Pugel said.

Without adequate changes, Pugel said, “we’ll end up with people just not wanting to work in state government” and a “gridlock of public service provisions.”