Wages and Legislature: Less bluster, please

It’s traditional for the posturing to rise to fever pitch about this time in any year where collective-bargaining contracts and legislative deadlines collide.

But this year, there is an odd new twist on the posturing. It used to take this form:

The unions insist they want, deserve and need their raises. If they do not get them, by golly, there will be trouble on the picket line.

At the Legislature there is great hand-wringing about the shortage of funds, the demands of other spending priorities and so forth.

In the end, the two sides come to a miracle compromise and a settlement is reached and funded in the waning days of the session.

The difference this year is mostly on the legislative front. Rather than posture about how little money they have, lawmakers have already signaled they will bend over backward to accommodate the union pay demands.

That cuts the legs right out from under negotiators for the state and counties. How can they hold firm to their position when the Legislature has already signaled, in effect, that it is willing to pay more than what is on the table?

Capitol Bureau Chief Kevin Dayton reports that the House Finance chairman has ordered a "rule-of-thumb" cut of up to 80 percent out of all of Gov. Cayetano’s new spending programs.

That would free up millions for new union wage contracts.

In the Senate, there was even some talk of looking for cuts that would be broad enough to accommodate the entire scope of public-worker wage demands — close to $600 million over two years.

The House proposal, even for discussion purposes, looks less realistic than it might at first glance. For instance, while Cayetano has proposed a generous slate of some $1.1 billion in new spending over the next two years, not all of that is open to legislative cutting for legal and political reasons.

On the political front, it seems almost certain that there will be increases, not decreases, in education spending. And many of the remaining big-ticket items in Cayetano’s list fall under court mandates (special-education improvements, services at the Hawai‘i State Hospital) or entitlements (rising Medicaid expenses, public- worker health benefits).

The actual wiggle room is much smaller than that, primarily in a handful of new programs and in areas such as debt service and payments to the public pension fund ($332 million) that can be adjusted through bookkeeping wizardry.

If the Legislature wants to send a signal, it might consider something beyond simply declaring that it will find money for raises, come hell or high water. Instead, it might signal that it will come up with the bucks for pay hikes in exchange for innovations and flexibility on the part of the unions that will have a long-term payoff.

An example is the tentative agreement of the United Public Workers to agree to some modest give-backs in vacation and sick-leave benefits for new hires in exchange for a modest boost in the pay package offered by the state.

Simply preparing for another round of wage hikes without expecting creativity or innovation does not move us forward. And if there is anything the Legislature should have learned by this point, the public will no longer tolerate the status quo.

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