By Chris Powell
Would the General Assembly’s rejection of Governor Lamont’s extravagant contract deal with the state employee unions have cost the state even more money?
That was the argument made by state House Speaker Matt Ritter and Hearst Connecticut Media’s columnist Dan Haar on the eve of the legislature’s vote. This argument was misleading in two respects but pursuing it illustrates the planned uncontrollability of state government’s labor costs.
The speaker and Haar noted that, by state law, the legislature’s rejection of the contract would have sent it to binding arbitration. The speaker and Haar maintained that the unions then almost certainly would have been awarded an even more favorable contract, because state government has a huge cash position at the moment, increasing its ability to pay.
Under the law, a contract arbitration award can be rejected by the legislature only once. Then it goes to a second arbitration, wherein special danger arises, since the law says the legislature cannot reject a second arbitration award.
Yes, the unions well might have done better in arbitration, since the process was designed 40 years ago as a mechanism for destroying the public’s sovereignty and since arbiters long have favored the unions.
But state government’s big cash position is not a reason for considering the new contract so affordable, for state government’s comprehensive financial position remains awful, with tens of billions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities. State government’s current budget surplus could be entirely applied to those unfunded liabilities and barely make a dent in them.
More importantly, even in the face of a second unfavorable arbitration award the governor and legislature would not have been helpless. They still could have achieved victory for the public by changing the law to let the legislature reject arbitration awards any number of times. Better still, they could have repealed the arbitration system entirely.
The problem with binding arbitration in government is that it is profoundly undemocratic. It reduces the public interest to equality with a special interest. Employee compensation is a huge part of state and municipal government expense — the extra cost of the new state employee contract is estimated at nearly $2 billion — and the bigger the expense, the more it should be determined by ordinary democracy.
On the municipal level in Connecticut 70% or more of government expense is employee compensation, yet binding arbitration effectively removes it from ordinary democracy. Elected officials are not what they should be, the last word on how most local tax dollars are spent.
But Connecticut’s elected officials at both the state and municipal level love binding arbitration precisely because it takes them out of democracy, allowing them to duck responsibility amid the conflict between the public interest and the special interest. Binding arbitration lets elected officials shrug and tell the public they were helpless.
Many years ago Connecticut also had a system of government in which all the big financial decisions were removed from democracy and vested in an unelected authority. It was called monarchy and the colony fought a revolution against it. The state is overdue for another revolution.
Such a revolution might be accomplished with surprising simplicity and candor.
Repealing the binding arbitration law would turn the governor, state legislators, mayors, and municipal officials back into the contract arbiters they should be.
Or the cowardice of most of those elected officials could be accepted and a new law enacted to create the elected offices of state arbiter and municipal arbiter, requiring them to face the voters every two or four years and giving them the power to determine government employee union contracts. Thus contract terms would become campaign issues, political parties would nominate candidates who would side with the unions or the public, and voters would settle the matter.
All the other elected state and municipal officials still could pretend to be in charge, contending over lesser matters, while the elected arbiters spent the great bulk of the government’s money and answered for how it was spent.
Of course the unions would oppose any such reform, precisely because it would restore democracy. Their opposition would be telling.
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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.
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Chris Powell column 