Tough times test relationships.
With California's leaders bickering over how to close a $15 billion budget deficit, state workers are unsettled over news that the correctional officers union has donated more than a half-million dollars to a Senate leader's political cause.
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association says it has given $577,000 to a committee controlled by Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata to defeat Proposition 11, the Nov. 4 legislative redistricting ballot initiative that he opposes. A union spokesman has said there's no link between the money and CCPOA'S support of a bill specifying a wage increase for the union's 31,000 members.
But to state Justice Department worker Kim Cooney, "this looks like a bribe by the CCPOA."
Her e-mailed comment is a rare case of a state worker making a public criticism. They generally don't knock their own. Many defer to a union or state agency spokesman. The unions representing them don't talk about each other. Ever.
But in these difficult economic times, tiny fissures are showing up on what is normally a united front across state departments, unions and the rank-and-file. They appear as nameless phone messages, e-mails that start with, "Please don't use my name," and anonymous posts on the State Worker blog.
The correctional officers union is a regular topic of these faceless comments. The critics often identify themselves as California state workers.
For a year CCPOA, which did not return calls seeking comment, has been working under the state's "last, best and final offer" after failing to reach a new contract deal. The proposed wage and benefits bill is similar to one floated last year that the union estimated would cost the state about $327 million. The Governor's Office figured the cost would be more like $1 billion.
The bill died. Now it's back, and other workers are having trouble with the CCPOA.
Nineteen of the state's 21 bargaining units are negotiating new contracts, but with the state's dismal finances there's no reason to believe a big raise is coming.
State employees like Sylvia Lewis, who works with the disabled, say their jobs pay less than similar private sector jobs.
She and her husband, a toxic waste investigative scientist for the state, have "many high school graduate friends with five to 10 years in a business who are making more money (by themselves) than my husband and I make together."
Cooney says the Justice Department is chronically hamstrung by its relatively low wages.
Pay at her office hasn't kept up with inflation "in as many years as I can remember," she said, "and I've been with DOJ over 25 years."
Lawmakers will pass a budget someday. Then contract talks covering California's 182,000 unionized workers will get intense.
You can bet state workers will be watching one another.
Call The Bee's Jon Ortiz, (916) 321-1043. Read his blog, The State Worker, at www.sacbee.com/blogs.
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