New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Republicans charge proposed state employee contract too rich
Suburban Republican taxpayers joined minority GOP members of the General Assembly’s budget-setting Appropriations Committee on Monday in attacking the proposed four-year, $1.9billion contract deal with 46,000 unionized state workers.
But the Democratic majorities pushed through the separate House and Senate resolutions along party lines.
Charging that the pending contract with the State Employee Bargaining Agent Coalition is an election-year giveaway, the opponents suggested that the state, although flush with tax revenue and federal pandemic-era support, should not agree to the deal, which includes 2.5-percent pay hikes, as much as $3,500 in retention bonuses, and a reopening clause for salaries in the final year, which would end on June 30, 2025.
The partisan opposition, which emerged in a public hearing Monday, will likely become a theme for the legislative week, when for the first time, the House and Senate will vote on contracts for 35 bargaining units under the SEBAC coalition banner. Past agreements had been allowed to lapse into effect without debates and votes in the General Assembly.
“They are over-extended and fed up,” said Kim Healy of Wilton, a CPA, who volunteers as a tax consultant for low-income state residents who she said are facing 8-percent inflation and some of the highest tax and electric rates in the nation. “People want to know where their tax dollars are going,” Healy said. “They want to know who’s advocating for them. This agreement was negotiated in secret, it seems.”
Healy, who unsuccessfully campaigned against state Sen. Will Haskell, D-Westport in
2020, said if the negotiations between Gov. Ned Lamont’s labor team had been open for public scrutiny, taxpayers would have gotten a better deal, more in line with the private sector.
“Our not-for-profits and many of our small businesses are still hurting from the COVID restrictions imposed by the state,” she said. “We should use the savings from a better-negotiated agreement to support them appropriately and in the long term. The SEBAC agreement is a bad deal, I believe, for Connecticut. It is tone-deaf and appears to even regular folks like me to pander to special interests in an election year.”
Andreas Duus of Greenwich, the former chairman of that town’s Board of Estimate and Taxation, also called for lawmakers to reject the deal. “This past year the state would have had a substantial operating loss if it we did not have the benefit of the special federal pandemicrelief funding,” Duus said. “If we did not get the incremental taxes from this last year’s historic stock market gains. Also, we probably should better account more fairly the cost of future retirement costs.”
Red Jahncke of Greenwich, president of the Townsned
Group International, LLC., said it is not true that state employees are leaving for more-lucrative jobs in the private sector, as portrayed by Connecticut union members and leaders.
“Connecticut state workers earn 33-percent more than comparable private-sector employees,” Jahncke said. “I think the representation that the state workforce is in danger of losing employees to the private sector flies in the face of that evidence that has been developed in a very comprehensive study.”
Andrew G. Biggs, senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who performed the study, told the committee that while salaries are about 5-percent lower than similar private-sector, health and retirement benefits are substantially better - about $16,000 as year - for Connecticut public unions than their private-sector counterparts.
But state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, co-chairwoman of the committee, noted that in recent years, new employees in state public-sector unions have 401(k)-style pensions.
“We saved over the last decade $100 million less both in salaries and medical costs for state employees than a decade ago,” Osten said. “I do fundamentally disagree with many of your assumptions, based on the changes that have been made to the pension plan and the medical plan.”
Dan Livingston, an attorney who is the lead negotiator for SEBAC, noting that the contracts are retroactive to July 1, 2021, noted that since one arbitrator decided that one of the bargaining units deserved a 3-percent raise for the first year, the state is saving money by giving them the 2.5 percent hikes.
“The agreement before you is the first since the Great Recession began in 2008 that was not negotiated in the midst a fiscal crisis,” Livingston said. “The prior three agreements not only have contributed to ongoing savings of well over $3 billion in each biennium.”
Lamont, during an unrelated event in Bridgeport Monday in Bridgeport, stood by the contract agreement.
“A 2.5 percent general wage increase plus a $3,000 bonus and in you’re in the middle of 8.5 percent inflation world, look, I think it’s a fair deal,” he said. “It’s a fair deal for the state employees who showed up every day in the middle of COVID. I’ve got to recruit and keep them in
order to keep our government going, I think it’s a fair deal to the taxpayers when you see where we are in terms of the high cost of living right now.”
He said that conservative think-tank estimates that it could amount to a 15 percent increase over the four years, Lamont said
the bonuses do not count as compounding the wage increase because they are one-time amounts.
“But at the end of the day, over three years, if they say it’s 15, 16 [percent] look at that compared to the rate of inflation,” Lamont said. “I think it’s a fair deal.”
In response to a question on the bonuses could be going to workers retiring in July, the governor said they’ve still earned it.
“Well two things,” he said, noting that agencies such as the Department of Transportation are short hundreds of engineers, designers and architects.
“One, they’ve worked really hard it’s been a pretty good year for the State of Connecticut,” Lamont said. “Third year in a row that we’ve had a surplus. Some of that is thanks to the incredibly hard work of our state employees. I come out of the private sector, when you do good work you get a bonus. What’s too expensive is not having a pay plan that retains your workers and attracts really good workers.”
The committee, also along party lines, also approved contract deals with 2,200 graduate students at high universities.