By David Shapiro

Gov. Linda Lingle's nomination of state labor negotiator Ted Hong to become a Hilo Circuit Court judge faces resistance in the state Senate because of questions about his temperament and level of community involvement.

Both are fair issues for senators to explore, but it becomes a foul when lawmakers say a key consideration in Judiciary Committee hearings will be Hong's relationship with the public employee unions with whom he negotiates wages, benefits and work rules.

It's another example of how pandering Democratic legislators, who receive substantial re-election support from public workers, corrupt collective bargaining by giving unions a measure of control over both sides of the bargaining table.

As state negotiator, it's not Hong's job to make the unions happy. To the contrary, his job is to strike hard bargains on behalf of taxpayers — a role that, by definition, is bound to make the unions cranky.

What perverse message does the Senate send by telling a labor negotiator he had better please the unions if he ever aspires to another position that requires Senate confirmation?

Why don't they just gift-wrap our tax dollars and truck the money to Hawai'i Government Employees Association chief Russell Okata for distribution to his members?

The HGEA and other public-worker unions haven't yet taken a position on Hong's nomination, but if he's rejected by senators because of their opposition, he won't be the first.

The Senate's 1999 rejection of Attorney General Margery Bronster for a second term was seen as payback for her investigation of politically powerful Kamehameha Schools trustees.

That was part of it, but a key factor in the razor-thin vote against Bronster was the HGEA's lobbying for her ouster. The union was annoyed by her legal opinions supporting then-Gov. Ben Cayetano's efforts to reform civil service.

Last year, the Legislature gave HGEA members the gift of binding arbitration, overriding Lingle's veto in a contrived special session orchestrated by the union, which no longer needs to risk strikes to achieve wage demands. Lawmakers refused to amend the law this year to make it more fair to taxpayers.

Binding arbitration was designed to prevent strikes by police, firefighters and other indispensable employees, a definition that hardly applies to HGEA's membership of mostly office workers.

Now, the union has little incentive to seriously negotiate with the state. It can simply let differences go to arbitration, safe in the knowledge that arbiters have favored unions in all but two cases over the past 30 years.

By some estimates, restoration of binding arbitration could add as much as $50 million a year to the state payroll, not including gift-wrapping.

Binding arbitration also denies state negotiators the opportunity to tie pay increases to changes in obsolete work rules that make the government slow to respond to modern problems. The union can get arbitrated wages without having to even negotiate work rules.

Pandering to public workers was a factor, too, in the House's passage last week of school "reforms" that didn't include a single major component that unions representing teachers, principals and support staff in the Department of Education didn't want.

In the real world, when was the last time you heard of a restructuring of a failing organization that made a priority of not disrupting the comfort of employees who were partly responsible for the organization's failure?

HGEA representatives are peppering the letters-to-the-editor pages with cries that all they want is a level playing field.

The bargaining table is tilted, all right, but all the marbles are rolling their way.

David Shapiro can be reached at dave@volcanicash.net.