Over at the Flathead Beacon, Kellyn Brown has a perceptive analysis of the risks that Montana’s public employee unions run in seeking salary increases in hard times.
Brown, quoting MEA-MFT president Eric Feaver, finds it “…hard to grasp the motivation behind this state’s union leaders’ recent stances, especially since the likelihood of an across-the-board pay raise is slim at best.”
I share Brown’s summing of the probabilities. As Brown notes, the 2011 legislature, widely expected to be Republican controlled, is not likely to provide unions with much comfort.
So why Feaver’s bluster and belligerence? Two reasons, I think. But let’s start with the opening paragraphs in his “Where do we go from here?” statement, issued in early summer:
Little good can be said about the pain state and university employees are suffering as they work their way through a two-year-long salary freeze. When we bargained that freeze immediately before the 2009 Legislature, Montana was descending into the Great Recession. And there was no purported “surplus.” We doubt one exists today despite curious assertions to the contrary. But the deal we made with the governor and passed through the 2009 Legislature did in fact save jobs and fund employee health insurance for the biennium. At the time, that was a good deal, the only deal we could make
But salary freezes just don’t wear well over time. Lest anyone wonders, MEA-MFT will not bargain another salary freeze. If unable to make a salary gain when we next meet the governor’s representatives at the prebudget bargaining table, we will take our chances with the next legislature. Damn the considerable political risks.
And it is wholly regrettable that school employees in far too many districts are right now bargaining salary freezes of their own. Uncertain state funding, escalating health insurance costs, and declining enrollment continue to pound away at the salaries school employees deserve.
In one sense, I’m sympathetic. Two consecutive salary freezes seems like unequal sacrifice as well as a surrender of hard earned gains over the years. Montana’s public employees, who, not without cause, consider themselves chronically underpaid, are aggrieved. More than a few are in a fighting mood, and think an aggressive opening is the key to a successful negotiation (forestall a cut by demanding a raise and settling on a freeze). These are not facts that Feaver, or any labor leader, can ignore.
Moreover, by threatening to take his chances in the legislature (not much of a threat in my opinion), Feaver may be underscoring the importance of electing union friendly legislators and trying to motivate union members to work harder on legislative campaigns. That’s rational, but it won’t have a big effect as union members are already working hard for union friendly legislators.
The larger issue involves economic fairness in a time of scarcity.
Unemployment is at the highest sustained level since 1940, matched only by the Reagan recession of 1982–1983. We face a growing probability of deflation. Although we need another, and bigger, much much bigger, federal stimulus package, we won’t get one. Instead, at least one house of Congress, and both chambers of the Montana Legislature, may be captured this fall by anti-government, libertarian reactionaries who would repeal the income tax, eliminate Social Security and Medicare, return to the gold standard, and generally try to turn the clock back to 1910 while reweaving our social safety net into burial shrouds.
Responsible legislators cannot ignore current economic facts.
That’s why raises for people with jobs are not the highest use of public money when so many are unemployed, when so many are hurting, when the economic waters into which we are sailing are the roughest since the Great Depression. In a just and wise society, those most in need — and those are not our neighbors with public sector jobs — have the highest claim on what help is available.
