VOLCANIC ASH

By David Shapiro

State Sen. Sam Slom has said that legislators function mainly these days to crown beauty queens and approve pay raises for public employees.

Slom's facetious statement has some ring of truth as this year's Legislature tumbles to a close with so much new revenue being sopped up for pay raises that little money will remain for other priorities.

Forget the initiatives enunciated by Gov. Linda Lingle and legislative leaders at the beginning of the session for a major affordable housing push, tax relief for the poor and middle-class and a full-on battle against homelessness.

After raises that could cost more than $200 million a year are paid to white- and blue-collar workers and public school teachers, there won't be enough left for more than baby steps on other pressing needs.

Clearly, job No. 1 for the Democratic majority in the Legislature is taking care of public employees who work tirelessly to get them elected, creating an incestuous government that feels entitled to serve itself first and the public second.

The big headline of the 2003 session was a last-minute maneuver by lawmakers to restore binding arbitration for the white-collar Hawai'i Government Employees Association, the state's largest public-worker union.

Last year was about helping unions representing teachers, principals and school administrators fight off Lingle's proposal to break up the statewide public school system.

This year has centered on pay raises for public workers, driven by the HGEA's arbitration award of a 10 percent increase over the next two years — more than twice what the Lingle administration said the state could afford to pay.

After the HGEA award, long-stalled negotiations with the teachers and United Public Workers were quickly settled for roughly the same amount.

With binding arbitration, true collective bargaining has virtually ceased to exist in public employment.

Workers get all the security of union membership while pay raises are handed to them without having to break much of a sweat at the bargaining table.

The state loses to its ability to control payroll costs and set spending priorities to arbitrators who needn't consider ability to pay.

This is not about whether public workers deserve pay raises; certainly they do in good economic times like we've experienced in recent years — especially after the freezes they took in some of the lean years of the 1990s.

It's about how much of the pie they're going to take, and without doubt they have the political muscle in the Legislature to hog it all.

After the HGEA award, Lingle said that virtually "every single penny" of the state's $1 billion in revenue growth in the past decade has gone for public worker pay raises and benefits.

"We won't have the money we should to help those of our citizens who do not work for the state of Hawai'i," she said.

House Speaker Calvin Say called Lingle's logic absurd and said workers shouldn't be blamed for the tight state budget, but he didn't dispute the governor's numbers.

We see the impact in the lack of major spending initiatives this year on needs other than labor costs.

What little new spending or tax relief there is must be taken from other programs— usually those benefiting the poor and needy who don't have the clout to get lawmakers elected.

Say is right that we shouldn't blame unions, whose job is to get their members what they want.

We should blame the vast majority of legislators who lack the backbone to take principled stands on behalf of public interests that run counter to their own selfish desires and those of their benefactors.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net.