Our opinion: Creating a pay commission for the state’s management confidential employees is a matter of simple fairness.
For nearly five years, the state’s non-unionized management-confidential employees have been caught in financial limbo — their pay frozen even as co-workers received raises, with no clear end in sight.
What the Cuomo administration calls a thaw came this week with the announcement of step and longevity increases that were due almost a year ago. These aren’t broad-based raises, and affect only about 3,200 of the 8,900 M
Cs, as they’re known in government shorthand.
Nor does this resolve the underlying unfairness: asking one group of employees to help balance the budget while their co-workers get raises.
These aren’t politicians for whom the topic of pay hikes is subject to all sorts of political calculations. Nor are they top political appointees who come into government for a brief period to either execute a governor’s agenda or enjoy a bit of patronage, nor unionized workers whose pay hikes are stalled by impasse in contract negotiations.
They are career civil servants, often the most trusted and valued people in an office, who have been relegated by the long freeze into second-class workers. If there’s a segment of the state workforce that has good cause to feel demoralized, they are it.
Though not part of the political class, the M/Cs are caught in state’s budget politics, much the way judges were from 1999 until last year, when they finally got a raise. That was the result of a decision by the governor and Legislature to separate judicial pay from the more politically charged issue of increases for lawmakers, statewide elected officials and the commissioners who often come and go with successive administrations.
A similar idea was floated last year for a commission to set salaries for M/C workers. The idea got as far as legislative approval. But Mr. Cuomo vetoed the bill, saying that it needed to be discussed in the context of the state budget, which is set in the spring. But in his 2014-15 executive budget, now under consideration in the Legislature, he didn’t include an M/C pay commission.
Little wonder. No raises for M/Cs for five years has added up to a savings to the state of roughly a half-billion dollars, according to the Organization of Management/Confidential Employees. Although the annual savings isn’t huge in the context of a $136.5 billion state budget, it’s spending that a governor who’s already under pressure to put more money into education, the environment and other areas would probably rather not have to deal with, especially in an election year when he’d prefer to give out tax cuts.
Which is exactly why Mr. Cuomo and the Legislature need to do the right thing and create this pay commission. In running this state, there really are two governments: There are politicians, who come and go with the political winds, and there are the people who actually make the government work, day in and day out. In exchange for the public’s expectation that they perform professionally, they deserve to be treated in kind.