U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye believes President Barack Obama’s call for a federal wage freeze was an important first step toward reducing the deficit, said Jennifer Goto-Sabas, Inouye’s chief of staff in Hawaii.

Inouye thinks everybody will have to come to the table to work toward deficit reduction, she said yesterday.

The wage freeze of civilian federal employees, if adopted, would affect tens of thousands of workers in Hawaii.

Hawaii had some 33,325 federal civilian jobs in 2009, representing 5.6 percent of the labor force in the state, including workers at military bases and part-time employees, according to the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations. It also includes an unspecified number of postal workers, who are not covered by the wage freeze.

The federal government is the nation’s largest employer, with about 2 million workers. About 85 percent of them work outside of the Washington, D.C., area.

The federal government paid out about $2.1 billion in wages out of $24.4 billion in wages from government and the private sector in 2009, the state department said.

In Hawaii a federal worker earned on average $63,542 in annual wages, compared with $44,057 for a state worker and $54,076 for a county worker, the department said. The average annual wage was lower for a worker in the private sector, about $38,836 annually, DLIR said.

The highest average wage was earned by employees involved in petroleum and coal products manufacturing: $105,661 in 2009. The second-highest average wage was $84,891 for employees engaged involved in businesses related to securities, commodity contracts and investments, the department said.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.