Employees' glee at Chiang's pay decision doesn't add up

SacBee: State Worker ^ | 6/23/11 | Jon Ortiz

[SmithL]

California's state workforce is so vast and diverse that a journalist can quickly get into trouble making blanket assertions about it.

But not this time.

State employees love it, love it, LOVE IT that Controller John Chiang decided a new voter-adopted law prevents him from paying legislators because they missed the June 15 deadline to pass a balanced budget.

For the last few years, delayed budgets fired up talk about whether state workers would be paid full wages on time.

In 2008 and again last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to hold their pay to the federal minimum wage while deadlocked budget talks dragged on. (Chiang refused to go along.)

. . .

Labor leaders, however, didn't want this showdown. In their view, budget gimmickry is creative financing by another name.

David Kieffer, executive director of SEIU California – which includes 95,000 state employees represented by SEIU Local 1000 – told The Bee not long ago that lawmakers should make taxes part of a solution to the state's $9.6 billion shortfall. Failing that, he suggested, Brown and the Democrats should go back to the "bottomless pit of gimmicks" to keep government running.

[SmithL]

In an all-cuts budget, the unions get hammered. And that's the only kind of budget that the Democrats can pass on their own.

If they want any kind of bipartisan budget, they'll have to come to terms with the Republicans on spending caps, pension reforms, and the over-abundance of government regulations.

[Cicero]

The executive director of SEIU California says that there’s a “bottomless pit of gimmicks.”

Now there’s a notable quotable for you.

[Graneros]

"Now there’s a notable quotable for you."

Absolutely. Particularly given who it's coming from.