The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Unions reject Lamont’s wage-freeze proposal
Governor’s plan to delete raises, save $142M draws fire
State employees' unions have rejected Gov. Ned Lamont's proposal for salary givebacks, possibly paving the way for more than $140 million in pay hikes to public workers over two years and forcing the state to find revenue or spending cuts to meet the governor's proposed budget.
Still, Lamont said Thursday he’s not giving up the effort to win concessions and avoid the scheduled raises.
But Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, D-New Haven, said Thursday that a bill he has introduced would be fairer to working families, by adding a one percent surcharge on the state’s capital-gains tax, to raise $130 million a year from the state’s wealthiest families.
“I’ve got 10-percent unemployment, people getting laid off around the country and all around the state, people are tightening their belts and I am going to go in and I’m going to ask them to help us, to be part of the solution,” Lamont told Hearst CT Media’s editorial board. “They got a five-percent increase across the board, you know, six months ago.”
The governor was responding to an earlier statement from the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition that flatly rejected his bud
get plan, which includes a two-year, 141.7 million savings by deleting negotiated pay raises of $44 million in the first year and 97.7 million in the budget year starting July 1, 2022.
"The governor’s budget assumes still more sacrifices from Connecticut’s public employees and working families, many of who have risked, and continue to risk, their lives every day to provide the much-needed services that our most vulnerable populations have relied on before and during the pandemic, and all of who have already sacrificed so much in the interest of the people they serve,” says the response of the unionized workers statement.
"This is just one of the many assumptions in the governor’s budget that we find profoundly troubling because it is so out of touch with the needs of all working families,” the union continued. “At its core, this proposed document assumes we can address the critical issues affecting all of Connecticut’s working families without profound reinvestment in the public services and public structures upon which our communities and our economy depends.”
The unions, representing about 50,000 state employees who have made several major contractual concessions over the last 10 years, suggested that Connecticut’s wealthiest, who profited in the pandemic “to join us in that fight by finally paying their fair share."
“Look, the rich paid more into our budget this year than ever before, but they were here to pay and that made a big difference,” Lamont said. “I think that’s part of my message and if we do things the same way we have for the last 20 years, the next 20 years, the state’s going to have a very tough row to hoe and I’m not going to let that happen.”
Lamont described his relationships with state unions as good, “but that doesn’t mean we always agree.”
Looney, in a Thursday night interview, said that less than one percent of taxpayers would be affected by the proposed surcharge on the current 7-percent capital gains levy. “Obviously that would go a long way toward funding municipal aid, social services and other things in the budget without imposing anything in the way of losing competitiveness or encouraging the wealthy to move,” he said. “That’s a reasonable way to go because it’s targeted and not punitive.”
Looney said that the wealthy are more concerned about keeping estate taxes aligned with the national average. “It seems to me that overall, whenever we think of raising revenue, we should think of progressive ways that affect those of means, rather than people of moderate income,” he said.
The proposed surcharge, which awaits discussion in the legislative Finance Committee, would apply to singles with adjusted gross incomes of $500,000 or more; and married couples making a million dollars or more.
Last summer as the pandemic was still in its first waves, Lamont asked state employees to turn down a pay wage that was part of a 2017 round of concessions, but he was rejected. There have been several SEBAC concessions on pay and benefits since 2011, when then-Gov. Dannel P. Malloy negotiated with state workers through the spring into the summer of 2011, when 14 of 15 bargaining units approved the givebacks in exchange for a no-lay clause.
After Lamont’s budget address on Wednesday, Sal Luciano, president of the state AFL-CIO, said that as an example of state employees going above and beyond in the pandemic, he told reporters about prison guards working double shifts, then checking into motels to protect their families from possible COVID exposure, while many other workers were safely at home.
“I think that it might be problematic,” Luciano said of Lamont’s proposal.
“I won’t speak for the workers themselves, but how many zeros have they take already?” when it came to pay raises, he said. “Twelve in 17 years. Something like that.”
The governor’s budget, which began to get scrutinized in the legislative Appropriations Committee on Thursday, is a two-year $46-billion package with a spending increase of two percent in the budget year starting July 1.
Asked what kind of conversation he might have with Looney about his proposed increase in capital gains, Lamont said he has a good relationship with the veteran Democratic leader, but his goal as governor is to make Connecticut attractive and make the tax base larger.
“Do we agree on everything? No,” Lamont said of Looney. “You have to see what your alternatives are and there is nothing more important than expanding the pie, getting more people here, getting more taxpayers here.”