The questions that should be posed by taxpayers to Washington state employee unions are as blunt as they are long overdue: What do you want to do? Do you want to save the jobs of your people so you can help not only them but those who need the services they provide? Or do you want to save the too-rich salaries, benefits and pensions your members are getting? The answer cannot be both. Sheer math (and the elephant in the equation is a projected $5.7 billion shortfall in state revenue) won’t allow both.
And the questions taxpayers should pose to state elected officials are equally direct: Why in the world did you (or your predecessors) cede control of union contract negotiations from the legislative branch to the executive branch with the 2002 Personnel System Reform Act? Did you (or they) believe the worst economic crisis in seven decades could never materialize? Didn’t those decision-makers understand that, if we’re going to hold legislators responsible for writing budgets, the Legislature and not the governor should negotiate union contracts?
Answers to all these crucial questions won’t be forthcoming anytime soon. What Washingtonians will receive instead is what we’ve gotten for the past couple of years from the politicians: tip-toeing around the real fiscal problem with half-baked, short-term Band-Aids whose adhesive strength is continually eroded by alarmingly declining revenue projections.
On Friday Gov. Chris Gregoire announced that unionized state workers will pay 15 percent of health care premiums starting in the 2011-2013 biennium; the state (taxpayers) will pay the rest. Her goal had been 26 percent paid by the union members. Currently they pay 12 percent. Connect those dots, and you can easily see a resounding triumph for the unions.
Union officials try to position this as balancing the budget on the back of state workers. That is unmitigated hyperbole. One example: “The solution can’t all come from state employees,” said Tim Welch of the Washington Federation of State Employees in a Friday Columbian story. Sir, no one ever proposed such a thing.
And no one is “taking” health care from state workers. Quit exaggerating, and stop the bombastic rhetoric. Carol Dotlich, the president of the Washington Federation of Employees, exclaimed: “To have our people scapegoated and to have their health care taken from them in this way is perhaps the cruelest thing the governor could do.” Really? The cruelest thing? With that kind of logic, no wonder talks between unions and the governor’s negotiating team haven’t been more productive.
Union leaders continually point to a two-year wage freeze, unpaid furloughs and increased out-of-pocket health costs as reasons to sympathize with their members. They also swoon with exasperation over staffing cuts. But such measures would not be necessary if unionized workers would simply pay their fair share. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, that’s not to happening. The foundation reports that the typical private-sector employee contributes 27 percent of his or her health care premium cost. That puts the increase state-worker unions accepted Friday — from 12 percent to 15 percent — into a more revealing light.
Let’s be realistic. Taxpayers are not opposed to taxes. We understand and appreciate the need for them. But what voters said when they rejected the candy tax, rejected the state income tax and reinstated the two-thirds required legislative approval for tax increases is: “Get your house in order before you expect us to pay any more.”
It’s time for the politicians and the negotiators to hear and heed that command.
