Pols’ ‘Open Season’ On the Public Sector

By Jim Cavanaugh, SCFL President

You know it’s an election year because it has been open season on public employees for the past several months.

There’s always at least a few people running for public office who try to gain some cheap political points by trashing teachers or snow plow drivers, but this year, probably because of declining public revenues due to the Great Recession and to the rise of the anti-government Tea Baggers, the public employee bashing seems louder and more wide spread than in the past.

Eight years ago, during a less severe recession, the Republican candidate for Governor had proposed slashing state aid to local governments, and he got beat. But Jim Doyle, the eventual Democratic nominee, positioned himself as the conservative candidate in the Democratic primary by saying that he would cut the number of state government workers back to where it had been sixteen years previous.  Never mind that most of the state government employment growth in those sixteen years was due to a ballooning prison population and thus that any serious cutting of the number of state employees meant either emptying the prisons or seriously cutting services for the state’s non-felons.

This year the Republican candidates for governor – Scott Walker and Mark Neumann – are aiming Howitzers at public employees, and the Democratic candidate – Tom Barrett – is taking his own potshots, albeit with lesser artillery.

Walker and Neumann both want to roll back taxes for the rich and businesses.  The current Legislature closed the so-called Las Vegas loophole which had allowed many large businesses to avoid Wisconsin income taxes; increased income taxes on the wealthiest of the state’s population by one percent; and brought the capital gains tax deduction into line with most other states.  Walker and Neumann want to repeal all three measures.

The cost of their tax cuts for the rich would be about a billion dollars.  Add that loss of revenue to a state budget that’s expecting a deficit of over two billion dollars, and you’re talking some serious money.

How do they propose coming up with this kind of money?  Why, take it out of the hides of public employees, of course.

Walker told the Milwaukee Press Club that he’d address the budget deficit by “proposing major wage and benefit cuts from state employees.”  But state government operations only account for about a quarter of the state’s budget.   Hence, according to Onewisconsinnow.org, Walker would have to cut state employee wages and benefits by 42% in order to make up for both the projected deficit and his tax cuts for the rich.  

At some point Walker must have figured this out for himself as well because he told the Appleton Post Crescent that he realized he’d have to go after the wages and benefits of local government employees as well:

“And, when it comes to the biggest part of the state budget – about 60 percent of it is aid to local governments: school districts, counties, municipalities – we’re going to have to say, ‘If you want to get state aid, there are things you can do to draw down your costs,’ which means wage and benefit reform at the local level.”

Most of the wages and benefits that Walker proposes slashing have been established through union collective bargaining.  Other than threats of furloughs he provides no details at all on how he’d get the workers to accept drastic cuts in the wages and benefits that they’ve negotiated over the decades.

As slippery and unreasonable as Walker’s posturing is, Neumann’s proposal for covering these huge revenue gaps is even less thought out.  On his website he says he will limit state government’s growth rate to one percent less than the rate of inflation.  He then makes some silly assumptions and engages in even sillier mathematics to determine that his plan, over two terms, would result in a tax cut of 24 percent for everybody.

When pressed for more details by the Baraboo News Republic, “Neumann was unwilling to be pinned down on where he would like to cut.  He said he would begin with an across-the-board reduction of spending with lower-level managers proposing how it should be done.  Neumann would then modify budget proposals by state department heads according to his own priorities.”  Vague as that all sounds, one can only conclude that he intends a frontal assault on state employees.

While the Republicans were playing this funny money game, the Democratic candidate, Tom Barrett, came out with a fairly detailed 26 page plan for how he would save the state $1.1 billion.  While some of the assumptions and some of the dollar figures in this extensive plan are suspect, there are also a lot of reasonable and doable proposals in it, which do not require gutting collective bargaining agreements or slashing the number of workers providing public services.  Nevertheless, his marketing people apparently couldn’t resist the temptation to join the current fad of dumping on government and government workers.  So they released this plan with the offensive title of “Putting Madison on a Diet.”

In the midst of all this political posturing, the Wisconsin State Journal, which has never met a union it doesn’t hate, came out with its annual “expose” of Madison city workers’ pay.  As it does every year, it found that a few Madison Metro bus drivers had taken advantage of their union contract’s seniority provisions to accumulate enough overtime to push their 2009 income over $100,000.

The paper parlayed this information into several articles and concluded with an editorial which urged the Mayor to continue his efforts “to stick to his more-than-reasonable goal of ending six-figure driver earnings.”  The editorial and an accompanying political cartoon expressed concern about the pension obligations these bus drivers’ earnings would lay on the taxpayers. A conservative member of the city council called for greater involvement of the council in contract negotiations.  And on and on.

Don't ask
In the midst of all this indignation, the State Journal never bothered to ask whether maybe Madison Metro is understaffed if there’s so much overtime available, just as it never bothered to inquire about how the Wisconsin Retirement System actually works and to do the math in order to see if this overtime would actually have a real impact on “the taxpayer.”

For the State Journal, the real, unspoken issue here is simply that blue collar workers shouldn’t be making six figure salaries.  I didn’t notice an editorial from the Journal about the Department of Administration Secretary getting a six-figure raise when he took a similar job with the UW System.  But then, the Journal has never complained about the income levels of the collar management types.

From the Journal’s perspective, the other offense of the bus drivers is that they are public sector employees: “Public sector compensation in general needs a reality check, given the recession and many challenges facing the private sector, which foots the bill for government at all levels.” 

No irony
This is the same argument Scott Walker used in the Post Crescent when he stated, apparently without a trace of irony in his voice: “It's not about picking on public employees, but pointing out you can't have wages and benefits here (holding hand high) for the government and wages and benefits for the private sector here (holding hand low), particularly on the benefits side.”

The issue of course is not that public sector workers are overpaid or are getting benefits they don’t deserve, but rather that too many private sector employees have seen their wages and benefits seriously erode over the last three decades.  Neither the State Journal nor Scott Walker has a plan to improve the wages and benefits of private sector workers. They simply don’t think it is necessary. For them, a rising tide need only lift the yachts.  Those of us in row boats should be happy if we’re still afloat.

The irony in all this is twofold.

First, many of the conditions of employment enjoyed by the bus drivers were negotiated into their contract back when they in fact were members of the private sector, back when private sector workers led the way for wages and benefit improvements.  The City took over the bus system and made the drivers public sector workers in 1983.  

Second, despite the groaning of the Journal and the politicians, public sector workers are still not paid on par with the private sector.  

A recent study by the Center for State and Local Government Excellence found that public sector wages and benefits are about 7 percent less than their private sector comparables.  In Wisconsin, the conservative Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance found that Wisconsin has more than 8 percent fewer government employees per capita than the national average and their total compensation is about 3 percent below the national average.

Memo to the State Journal and gubernatorial candidates:  There ain’t any blood left in that stone.