The Glendale News-Press weekend editorial, A Tale of Two Districts, contrasts recent Glendale Community College staff concessions with the Glendale Teachers Association’s refusal to accept reduced benefits. I heard the GTA president speak last week, and was struck by the union’s lack of awareness. Almost everyone else these days is making do with fewer health benefits and paying more for health insurance.

Class War: How public servants became our masters shows (with most examples in California) that benefits and pensions allocated to public employee unions are more generous than private-sector packages, often politically motivated, and clearly unsustainable.

Public Employee Unions Are Sinking California, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reports the following data to back its claim -

Approximately 85% of the state’s 235,000 employees (not including higher education employees) are unionized. As the governor noted during his $83 billion budget roll-out, over the past decade pension costs for public employees increased 2,000%. State revenues increased only 24% over the same period. A Schwarzenegger adviser wrote in the San Jose Mercury News in the past few days that, “This year alone, $3 billion was diverted to pension costs from other programs.” There are now more than 15,000 government retirees statewide who receive pensions that exceed $100,000 a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.

Meanwhile, the LA Times reported this past week that CalSTRS is facing a $43 billion shortfall; the Orange County Register Watchdog blog continues its series on retired educators receiving more than $100,000/year in CalSTRS payments; California Pension Reform maintains a list of “top ten” CalSTRS recipients (number one gets $285,460.92 yearly); and CalPERS held a one-day forum on “ensuring future retirement security”, attended by public pension managers, union representatives, and government officials (one pension reform advocate was invited).

So many articles have been published just in the past week on this subject that they won’t all fit under the Sunroom Desk Paperweight. Pension Tsumani’s sidebar, with an extensive daily archive, is a good source for more reading on the subject.

Edited down to simple imperatives, some of the rules are easy to understand and would gain approval from most taxpayers employed in the private sector. Others are more difficult to implement, and could pose problems for the city. Here’s an edited list, to which I’ve added questions and comments in italics:

1. Rescind Memorandum of Understanding for management employees.

2. Streamline Memorandum of Understanding with respect to time off: Set a maximum number of paid days off for all vacation, holiday, sick leave, union meetings, wellness time, to 20 days off maximum. (What about maternity leave?)

3. Flatten the organizational chart to five layers.

4. Limit supervisory positions to those with 15 or more subordinates. (Why this number and not 10 or 8?)

5. Eliminate Civil Service protection for division heads and unit managers after six years. (They may not need it after six years, but what about after 16 or 26?)

6. Hold unit managers accountable to performance measures. (Who creates these performance measures?)

7. Eliminate overtime, or pay in lieu of overtime, for managers or anyone with professional designation.

8. Require safety and emergency personnel to live within 30 minutes (at peak hours) from the borders of the city. (This is discriminatory and unfair to homeowners living more than 30 minutes from Glendale.)

9. Eliminate reimbursement for further education, tuition, books, etc. (What about departments like Information Technology, which must keep staff current on the city’s hardware and software systems?)

10. Reduce the number of pay steps and the percentage increase for each step and limit pay increases to COLA.

11. Remove health, education and transportation benefits from Cost of Living Adjustments; they are already part of the Consumer Price Index.

12. Equalize health insurance coverage and contributions for all city employee levels.

13. Disallow rehiring of retired employees as consultants or temporary executives.

14. Limit benefits to less than 50% of an individual’s salary. (There may be instances where health care benefits paid out equal more than 100 percent of an individual’s salary.)

15. Set bonuses to clear standards of business unit performance; make them transparent to employees and taxpayers. (Why should public sector employees get bonuses at all? They should work in the private sector to improve an organization’s bottom line if bonuses are their goal!)

16. Limit staff meetings to less than 10% of employee hours and less than 5% for non-safety employees. (This arbitrary rule doesn’t take into account the complexities of public sector management, including the need to deal with the public regularly!)

17. Dismiss any employee who causes a loss in a court of law to an amount greater than his yearly salary. (A dismissal on grounds like these could easily result in another lawsuit!)

18. Set civil service pay at 10% below private sector and NGO average.

19. Freeze all employee pay and benefits when a recession is declared or when local unemployment reaches 7%. (Who declares the recession? Make it simpler: if revenues decrease, pay doesn’t increase.)

20. Reduce pensions greater than the per-capita income of area working adults. (Why not tie public sector pensions to private sector pensions and retirements instead?)