Article by Erik Smith. Published on Friday, February 20, 2011 EST.

16,200 Non-Union Workers Will Get an Honest-to-Gosh Pay Cut, Not Furloughs – and it Starts Three Months Sooner

OLYMPIA, Feb. 18.—A couple of months ago, Democratic leaders in the state Legislature said state employees had suffered enough. So they wouldn’t cut any further than the governor had already proposed.

            Turns out they meant unionized state employees.

The ones who aren’t union members – they’re going after those.

            The budget bill that is expected to go to the House and Senate floors today sets up two classes of employees in state government, and it gives the state’s 16,200 non-union employees a worse deal than the one that was extended to unionized workers in December.

The non-union workers get an actual 3-percent pay cut, not the flexible furlough plan Gov. Christine Gregoire worked out with the unions at the bargaining table. That means non-union workers will be paid less for working the same number of hours.

            And the non-union workers get the whack immediately, on April 1. Most members of the state’s public-employee unions won’t start taking furloughs until the beginning of July.

            It might satisfy those who think state employees didn’t take enough of a hit last December, but it also means that the Legislature is giving union workers special treatment. Some people think that’s just not right. “I think it sends the wrong message,” said state Rep. Gary Alexander, the House Republican point man on the budget.

            An Honest-to-Gosh Pay Cut

            The idea showed up for the first time when House Bill 1086 passed the Senate a couple of weeks ago. It aims to save $3.4 million during the last three months of the 2009-11 budget period, by cutting the salaries of employees who are “not subject to a collective bargaining process.” There are exceptions for state troopers, elected officials, employees of the state printer, ferry workers and college and university employees.

State agency administrators say it means the non-union workers get a real pay cut – they’ll still be working the same hours but their checks will be smaller. And wherever employees are allowed to join unions, you can be sure a union organizer will be there to sign people up.

            It’s certainly a different sort of deal than the one the unions got. Last December, there was plenty of talk about a three percent salary cut, but the unions got it in the form of flexible furlough days that could be scheduled with management. So they got time off in return. Their new contracts begin July 1, so their reductions don’t begin until the next budget – which the Legislature still hasn’t written.

            There was plenty of carping last December that the unions didn’t get a real pay cut.

            Lawmakers took care of that here.

            The same language shows up in the “conference version” of the budget that will be considered today.

            A Cut to ‘Administration’

            Why take a whack at the non-union workers? Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown said Senate Democrats saw it as a cut to “administration.” That’s because some of the non-union workers are agency managers.

            “It’s a place where we could go,” Brown said. “We couldn’t violate collective bargaining agreements but we could go there. It includes our own staff, for example. It’s not something we were looking forward to, but it was another administrative cut, and I think it was a pretty well articulated position in both the Democrat and Republican caucuses, that if you can do more on administration, you should do more on administration.”

            And those workers can afford it, she said.

            “I don’t think it’s unfair,” she said. “I think in many cases, these are – not always, but in many cases – they are higher-paid individuals that could start salary reduction a little bit earlier.”

            Brown said there was no intention to give unions better treatment.

            OFM Cries Foul

            This was none of the governor’s doing, said Marty Brown, director of the Office of Financial Management, and no relation to the Senate majority leader. The governor intended for the non-union workers to get the same deal as the union workers.
The facts are wrong, he said. The non-union workers are all over the map in terms of salaries. And he points out that many of them could never be represented by unions because of state prohibitions. “Even if they wanted to be in a union, they couldn’t be,” he said.

             There’s just something wrong with the whole idea, he said.

“The governor’s view is that our problems should be solved through shared sacrifice, rather than one group getting it earlier than another group.”

When this idea first turned up, Brown said it would likely cost more to implement than it would save – perhaps as much as $5 million in programming costs. Now he says that the figure is wrong, the result of miscommunication with the state Department of Personnel. That agency now estimates reprogramming costs at $74,000, though it’s not going to be easy getting it done before April 1.

            That raises the possibility of a veto. In this state the governor has the ability to veto sections of a bill. The non-union pay cuts appear in a concise spot, Section 707, and could be struck without affecting the rest of the bill. Brown isn’t saying whether the governor will veto that section, but he does expect the governor to take action quickly after the bill passes both chambers of the Legislature and lands on her desk, most likely later today.

            Attorney General’s Office Hit Hard

            One of the agencies that will be hit the hardest is the state attorney general’s office, where none of the 1,200 workers are represented by unions. That includes 500 lawyers and 700 civilians – right down to the front-office receptionists. About 20 percent of the overall state cut goes to that office alone.

            Said communications director Janelle Guthrie, “We’re doing our part to help address the budget shortfall, but we’d prefer a more fair approach that gives our agency a budget target to meet and lets us reduce costs to taxpayers in a less draconian way. We’ve proven we can manage our budget and reduce personnel costs without resorting to across-the-board cuts.”

            A Matter of Fairness

            The politics of it all actually are a little tricky. In the Senate, the Republicans are largely on board with the budget proposal. They negotiated with Democrats and accepted a few things they didn’t like in order to get a few things they did. So they’re not raising a ruckus. Over in the House, it’s a different matter.

            Alexander, R-Olympia, says his caucus was shut out of the process  – and since he’s going to be voting no, he’s a little freer to speak his mind.

“It is not a question to me of whether I think I support or do not support unions,” he said. “The question is if you have two employees, like you and I, sitting across the table, and we are working side-by-side, and I’m a member of the union and you’re not, and I’m going to get to maintain my salary and you are going to get 3 percent less for doing exactly the same amount of work – there is going to be some amount of anxiety and some amount of frustration and maybe anger in the process.”

             The word already was getting around the legislative staff Thursday afternoon. They were boiling, Alexander said – and he couldn’t blame them.

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