A report from CTMirror
quotes the governor on Dan Livingston’s refusal to adjust the terms of a
contract hammered out in 2017 by former Governor Dan Malloy and SEBAC. The bargaining
coalition “has rejected his [Lamont’s] call for workers to forgo raises owed
them at month’s end and help the state cope with financial pressures caused by
the COVID-19 pandemic.
“’I would have put it off, and I think we should put it off,’
Lamont said of the raises. ‘I think we’re in an economy where you’ve got close
to 20% unemployment. I think you’re in an economy where you see a lot of people
on furlough.’”
The governor is referring to the results of his executive orders issued during the Coronavirus shutdowns.
Apparently there has been some sort of communication between
the governor and SEBAC’s legal eagles. Lamont told SEBAC, according to the CTMirror
piece, “You delivered, and you delivered at considerable risk to yourself, and
you deserve that. But I also said something else. I said I can’t see giving
everybody, everybody, in state government a raise right now, scheduled for June
30.”
Should SEBAC have acceded to Lamont’s request to forego
contractual raises?
Dan Livingston is a lawyer. As such, he could abrogate the
contract to which both the unions and the state are a signatory, but any lawyer
in the state would be justified, under those circumstances, to call for Livingston’s
disbarment on charges of extreme incompetence.
Livingston, in any case, quite predictably said “no deal” to
Lamont.
Because the deal made by Malloy and unions is contractual, a final resolution of any ensuing problems must be settled in the courts and not in the
people’s legislative chambers, the General Assembly. In other words, SEBAC
negotiators know that they can pull both the governor and legislators by the
nose with impunity – because the Malloy-SEBAC agreement is written in contractual
stone. And tears, however copious, will not be enough to convince SEBAC to
forgo its legal claims, though Lamont, it must be said, has certainly tried to
appeal to the angels of Livingston’s better nature. Pointless threats are
pointless. Lamont has said he thinks forgoing the raises would “send the right
signal and that’s how we work together. I’m not looking to lay anybody off, but
I think that’s what you [Livingston and SEBAC] SHOULD do.”
Lamont CANNOT lay off any state workers hired before 2017, whose salary and benefit packages are far more costly than new hires, because a no-layoff codicil is part of the Malloy SEBAC agreement the terms of which do not expire until 2027, by which time, CTMirror tells us, Connecticut once again will be swimming in debt: “The $530 million shortfall projected for the fiscal year that ends June 30 has grown to about $900 million, a result of a delay in federal Medicaid payments. But bigger problems lay just over the horizon.
"Simply put, from 2021 through 2023, the state’s revenue craters. State budget analysts project shortfalls ranging from $2 billion to $2.33 billion in each of those three fiscal years.”
Of course, “SHOULDS” have no legal bearing on contracts.
Contracts are contracts, enforceable by courts.
Asked whether he might use his extraordinary emergency
powers to force SEBAC to its knees, in much the same way he already has forced
Connecticut’s businesses to their knees, Lamont said he had no authority unilaterally
to revoke agreed upon contractual wage boosts. It is a question outside the narrow
borders of this column whether Lamont has the constitutional authority to
suspend First Amendment religious rights or rights of assembly or the general property rights of a
majority of Connecticut business owners. Both federal and state constitutions are also civil contracts between the people and their governments, and the rights specified
in the Bill of Rights and Connecticut's Constitution are, we have been told, imprescriptible.
Lamont is not the governor of SEBAC; he is the governor of
Connecticut, a state whose unfunded pension liability amounts to $32,805 per
person and 45.13 percent of Connecticut’s gross state product, according to a report
issued by The American Legislative Exchange Council. To turn a phrase
often iterated by former President Ronald Reagan: Union contracts are not the
solution to the problem; they are the problem.
The General Assembly is a political body whose mission is to
represent the will of the people, not the will of Dan Livingston. Together, the
executive department and the legislative department should vow, when they
reassemble, to de-contractualize union salaries and benefits, to separate for
future generations of taxpayers what never should have been joined together in an unholy matrimony.
Democrats, when they get the chance, should re-read President Franklin Roosevelt’s
letter to President of the National Federation of Federal Employees Luther
C. Steward, in which Roosevelt declined to endorse collective bargaining for federal
employees:
“All Government employees
should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually
understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct
and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The
very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative
officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with
Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak
by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly,
administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in
many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or
rules in personnel matters.”
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