State employees finding out how other half lives

You’d have thought the state had struck down 40-hour work weeks, the minimum wage and child labor laws in one fell swoop to hear the leaders of the biggest state employee labor union tell it last week.

Greg Devereux, executive director of the Washington Federation of State Employees, came unhinged after the Public Employees Benefits Board voted to – get this – not raise state workers’ share of their health care costs.

To be fair, Devereux wasn’t protesting the board’s decision to require employees to continue to pay 12 percent of their health care premiums, but how the board got to that number.

The Legislature provided more money for state workers’ health care plans this year, but not enough to cover inflation. An accounting mistake by the benefits board added to the hurt. To negotiate premiums that would maintain the 12/88 split between workers and the state, the board had to increase co-pays and deductibles.

That’s what had Devereux riled up. He called the move an “absolute travesty” and the Legislature’s failure to provide more money a “crime.” “They won’t tax anybody else, but they’ll tax state employees.” Federation president Carol Dotlich said state workers had already “sacrificed” $1 billion in pay raises and other benefits they would have received in better economic times.

Unions and rhetoric certainly go hand in hand, but this is over the top. Millions of private sector workers have been laid off. The ones still lucky enough to have a job are subject to pay cuts, furloughs, the loss of employer contributions to retirement accounts – and, oh, sharp increases in health care costs. The average employee in the private sector who has health insurance pays at least 22 percent of the premium.

The argument used to be that government employees deserved richer benefits because they were paid so much less than their private-sector counterparts. That argument no longer holds.

Steve Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, cited a 2005 study that showed the average public-sector worker earned 46 percent more in salary and benefits than comparable private-sector workers. And in the last year, state and local government worker pay and benefits rose 3.1 percent, compared to 1.9 percent in the private sector.

Malanga went on to note that “the real power of the public sector is showing through in this economic crisis. Some 5 million private-sector workers have lost their jobs in the last year alone, and their unemployment rate is above 9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“By contrast, public-sector employment has grown in virtually every month of the recession, and the jobless rate for government workers is a mere 2.8 percent.”

Public unions best be careful. Crying poor me over having to pay $25 to see the family doc while the unemployed queue up around the block to get into a job fair is not just bad form. It’s also an invitation to taxpayer backlash.