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Gradual increase
A recent television news investigation found it wasn’t very difficult to find public work crews doing everything but working at job sites in the D.C. area. We’ve all passed a work crew and wondered why so many of them seem to be watching, not doing, work. It’s a fair question in good times, but during a recession it’s even more important for taxpayers to ask how their money is being spent.
According to a recent study, the pay of public workers in the state rose considerably faster than that of workers in the private sector during the last decade. Teachers, particularly, were the recipients of year after year of dramatic pay boosts. Without debating if that was enough or too much, we wonder how much taxpayers are supposed to come up with before our public workers feel they are adequately paid. The answer is, there is no limit. The workers themselves long ago abandoned any self-restraint in their demands—as half of the adversarial system of negotiation, teachers and other public employees find they have to insist on the most outlandish demands, hoping they get at least part of what they ask for. The easiest place to lay blame is on the legal community—with more lawyers than any other country, they find clients who didn’t even know they had a beef.
Any discussion of the compensation of public employees, however, should make note of the fact that the increase in teachers’ pay during the ’80s was designed to bring the state’s average teacher’s salary up from near the bottom in comparison with other states. The effort worked, and as a result Virginia was able to attract and keep higher quality educators. Having given teachers six-, seven- apd eight-pcrcenKpay raises year
after year in the last decade,) taxpayers neemto step back and wonder what the ideal pay scale looks-mfirWe may be approaching it; we may have already exceeded it.
After adjusting for inflation, wages and salaries of private employees rose an average of 13.3 percent in the 1980s. Local government employees in Virginia saw pay increases, on average, of 18.7 percent during that same decade. But state workers, over the 10 years, received a bonanza of 23.2 percent. Public employees also get better fringe benefits, more holidays, longer paid vacations and more generous sick leave packages. And just try to fire one because of incompetence. They’ve got better job security than the pope.
Voters should remember all of this in November, when the legislature’s $600 million bond issues go before the electorate. The General Assembly can’t say no to its own staff, then wants to cop out and get the voters to bless a half-billion in public projects. If a little more restraint was shown by Richmond toward its own bureaucracy, maybe the legislators could fluid a few more of these items out the general fund.
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