At a time when state employees already are reeling from furloughs that will effectively cut their salaries by 15 percent, as well as hiring freezes and other uncertainties, leave it to The Bee to pile on its July 1 editorial "Pensions like it's 1999: Good start."
Public employees have traditionally made a trade-off: Lower wages in return for improved benefits and retirement security. That is why the public sector has generally been able to pay below-market wages. If you compare the salaries of public employees with those of private-sector employees with the same job descriptions, you'll find that public employees usually earn less. Today, unfortunately, not only are public employee wages under attack, so are the health benefits and pensions, which have made the trade-off acceptable.
Pension benefits are part of the total pay package for employees. State employees have always shared the pain of economic downturns. From January 1991 to January 1999, for example, while inflation increased 29 percent, state employee wages increased 11 percent. But, somehow, The Bee doesn't think that state employees should benefit when the economy turns around.
The Bee's support of pay and benefit cuts and layoffs for public employees as a solution to the current budget crisis might make some sense if there was a decline in the demand for public services. Unfortunately, quite the opposite is true – the demand for public services has never been higher. Even The Bee has editorialized against cuts in services.
You can't have it both ways: cutting pay and benefits, and laying off workers while expecting services to be maintained. But apparently that's exactly what The Bee and our legislators expect.
To make matters worse, the state will be facing a wave of retirements over the next few years. These employees will need to be replaced. Reducing health and pension benefits for new state employees guarantees that higher wages will be needed to recruit them.
Perhaps the only bright side to the current fiscal crisis is that it gives us the opportunity to decide what kind of a state we want to leave for our children and grandchildren, and how we are going to pay for it. If the public is unwilling to pay for public services, then we should not provide them. We shouldn't be asking those who willingly serve the public to also subsidize public services.
J.J. Jelincic is past president of the California State Employees Association.
About Comments
Reader comments on Sacbee.com are the opinions of the writer, not The Sacramento Bee. If you see an objectionable comment, click the "report abuse" button below it. We will delete comments containing inappropriate links, obscenities, hate speech, and personal attacks. Flagrant or repeat violators will be banned. See more about comments here.