If you’re trying to keep the county budget in line and taxes low, what’s the 1,600-pound gorilla in the room?
Salaries, benefits and wages.
There’s no getting around the huge cost associated with keeping folks employed. That’s true for both private and public workplaces.
The difference, of course, is private business — to stay in business — has pushed hard on what it can afford. For the public sector, it has mostly been business as usual.
This all came up again this week when we ran a story on the county and its negotiations with the unions. The county has about 1,600 employees and 400 of them just cut a deal:
Wage freezes for two years, plus for the first time these county employees will begin to pay a small piece of their health insurance premiums in 2012.
But is this just working around the edges? Is there still a huge imbalance compared to what’s going on in the private sector?
I spoke to Commissioner Tom Mielke about this because he was quoted in our story.
“There’s lots of work still be done,” Mielke said. “When you look at salaries, benefits and pensions, we are overpaid.”
In fact, Mielke said he’s seen some statistics that show that public-sector employees get 17 percent more than the private sector.
Union officials, of course, brush off all the statistics. You know “liars use numbers and numbers lie” stuff. But eventually the weight of the evidence becomes overwhelming.
Numbers aside, the system is set up to make clean comparisons between private and public compensation almost impossible.
Mielke said it’s difficult to get a handle on all of this because there are so many tentacles stuck in so many different places, untangling it all is a nightmare.
I mentioned to Mielke the Time magazine article about salaries:
“Public and private workers increasingly live in separate economies,” the article concluded.
Mielke agreed.
• • •
I also sat down with a governmental type who has a good understanding of where we’re at with public payroll and how it’s playing out. I ran a bunch of assumptions by him:
• Public unions have little interest in reducing salaries, benefits and pensions in order to save union jobs. They know they have a shot at influencing what a worker gets. But the government has the final say on how many people are on the payroll.
He agreed.
• A decade or so ago government contract negotiators basically gave away the farm. There was little interest in making waves, so what the unions asked for, they got. Now, any movement away from the sweet deals of the past is looked at as a takeaway. A giveback. And that makes negotiating difficult.
He agreed.
• Today, government negotiators know they need to play hardball with the unions but no negotiator will do so unless they see some political will to back them. And that political will is rarely there.
Why? Because public unions have money to give politicians and feet on the street to get the vote out.
He agreed.
• • •
So is there any hope? Yes, I’m told. It won’t be because there is some altruistic desire to even the playing field between the private and public sector.
It will come because of another gorilla showing up in the room:
Governments are out of money.
I think everyone wishes the private sector could get what the public sector has. But the private sector works off the premise “what the market will bear.” The public sector? Not so much.
Here’s hoping the government can make things fair.
Lou Brancaccio is The Columbian’s editor. Reach him at 360-735-4505 or lou.brancaccio@columbian.com.
