Top Calif. Official: States Using Budget Woes As Smokescreen For Anti-Public Union Drive
Monday, January 31, 2011(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
State officials around the country are using state and local budget woes
as a smokescreen for campaigns against public unions and their workers, a top
California state official says. In a Jan. 24 telephone press conference, hosted
by the Economic Policy Institute, California Treasurer Bill Lockyer (D), said if
those pols succeed, the cuts would devastate not only workers but
services. EPI scholars added the devastation would spread to the private
sector, imperiling the fragile recovery from the Great Recession.
Budget
data show states face cumulative deficits of $235 billion combined in 2011-12,
with the biggest problems in California and Illinois. Since states, except
Vermont, must balance their budgets yearly, governors of both parties have been
eyeing public workers’ salaries and pensions for
cuts.
Lockyer says that’s wrong: The two big drivers of state deficits, he said, are
escalating health care costs and what analysts say is a 31% collapse in state
revenues due to the recession. And many of the officials who are
campaigning against public workers’ pay and pensions – he didn’t name
names – really have an anti-union
agenda.
Several right-wing think tanks have also suggested states declare bankruptcy, as
yet another way to escape obligations – including union contracts.
Lockyer turned that down flat. “Behind that is an attack on state
workers,” he
said.
“This is all fiction and all speculative,” he said of the right-wingers’
arguments.
AFSCME and other unions that represent public workers are responding by citing
the need for state and local services, especially in a recession, where the
unemployed turn to states for aid. They also point out those services –
schools, hospitals, fire departments, police, corrections officers, road work
– are not only essential but put money in workers’
pockets.
That led EPI analyst Ethan Pollack to agree that advocates of cutting state and
local workers’ pay “are more about scapegoating state and local government
workers,” and unions than about cuts. “Studies show state workers,
with comparable education and experience and in comparable jobs, earn 6.8% less
than their private counterparts. Local workers earn 7.4% less,” Pollack
said.
Still, with the state governments facing the budget crunch and with tax revenues
still far below their levels of several years ago, legislatures and governors
– though not in California, he hoped – might look solely at budget cuts to
balance the books. That would include worker cuts, pension cuts and
program cuts, Lockyer
said.
“It’s not like you’re cutting one account and X number of jobs,” if that
happens, he elaborated about his state’s looming $28 billion deficit, which
Gov. Jerry Brown, D-Calif., and the legislature are
tackling.
“It’s a question of do you cut the $9.50-an-hour home health care aides”
– who are now unionized in California – “who help keep people in their
homes and out of nursing homes.” Other questions include whether the
University of California system would lay off workers or impose another huge
tuition hike and what would happen to education aid to local governments, which
is roughly half the state
budget.
“If that gets cut, maybe 40,000 teachers get laid off, the schools shut down
for several weeks and the cafeteria workers go home without paychecks.
It’s a question of cutting 500,000-600,000 state and local jobs, and that’s
a lot in California,” he said.
- Mark Gruenberg, Press
Associates, Inc.