By Chris Powell
Whether the school bus drivers who lately have been striking in Meriden and Coventry are underpaid, as they complain, is largely a matter of whether qualified replacements can be hired for them at similar compensation. Since labor generally seems scarce in Connecticut, with job openings being advertised almost everywhere, replacing the strikers without raising pay and benefits may be difficult, especially since crossing a picket line is no fun and risks the usual retaliatory union thuggery.
In any case school bus drivers are essentially municipal government employees, working for a contractor performing important government service, and if they were employed directly by government, they would be compensated much better for the same work.
Why does employment directly with government in Connecticut pay so much better?
First, perhaps, is that government is mostly a monopoly and there is little competition for the services it provides. So in most cases government can name its own price, imposed in taxes.
Second is that state law encourages unionization of government employees and gives their unions huge advantages against what passes for public administration.
Third is that, to preserve these advantages, government employee unions are aggressively organized politically — far more organized than any other special interest and mere taxpayers. Connecticut’s government workforce is reported to be the most unionized government workforce in the country, with 75% of state and municipal government employees belonging to a union. So a candidate for municipal or state elective office who declines to pledge obedience to the government employee unions seldom has much chance.
In contrast, only about 7% of private-sector employees in the state are unionized. Those union members are not much of a factor politically.
All this implies that private-sector workers may not be underpaid as much as the government class is overpaid.
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It’s easy to think of government jobs that are less important than the jobs of school bus drivers. Keeping the drivers only indirectly employed by the government, through contractors, saves taxpayers a lot of money.
It’s the same with nursing home workers. Most nursing home patients in Connecticut are government wards, their care financed by Medicaid, and nursing homes are mainly government contractors. Thus technically their employees work in the private sector, often making little more than subsistence wages with limited benefits. Some are represented by unions but attempts to raise their compensation have not been very successful. Much of the nursing home workforce is transitory, in part because the work is often unpleasant.
State government also saves taxpayers a lot of money by operating nursing homes through contractors. Nursing home and other social welfare organizations that fulfill what are essentially government’s responsibilities are always at the end of the line when government appropriates for raises. The raise money is usually exhausted by the people directly employed by the government, the politically organized, long before any reaches the nursing home and social-service workers.
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The cargo of school bus drivers is precious, just as the “cargo” of nursing home workers is. Thus their compensation will always be a matter of great public interest, and, whether the public realizes it or not, will always be determined by government policy — how much school boards are willing to pay bus contractors, how much the state and municipal governments give school boards, and how much the state and federal governments are willing to pay for indigent patients.
That is, while the work may look like the private sector, it’s not, and it’s all a matter of taxes.
Taxes in Connecticut are high, especially in light of government’s many excesses and inefficiencies. Fairness would suggest economizing with the regular government workforce, diverting money to the low-paid employees of the government contractors, who lately have been clobbered by inflation even as state and municipal employees have been insulated by comfortable raises.
But to govern is to choose, and who in authority will choose fairness when the most powerful special interest is against it?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 