State workers

What happens when managers don’t do their jobs?

What are the consequences for workers when the people in charge are indecisive, and worse, afraid to act?

Maine’s public employees are learning the painful answers to those questions.

In 1991, the governor and the Legislature wiped out a pay raise due state employees by making them take mandatory furlough days. The state now can’t increase the number of furlough days (already 17), without putting itself in the absurd position of paying its employees to stay home for a month or more at the equivalent of the 1990 pay rate.

The Appropriations Committee has responded with a new plan: Cut the work week from 40 hours, to 37 hours.

This solution has virtues. It will save $20 million. It may make sense to reduce the hours in the state work week. But it ignores the real problem, and that is that Maine’s state government payroll is too big.

According to Sen. Joseph Brannigan, appropriations chairman, the committee didn’t want to “hit the schools again or the municipalities,” to balance the state budget.

Those are not the real options, and the senator and his colleagues know it.

How about the Legislature choosing to do its job?

Maine’s lawmakers have a plan to restructure state government, and the ideal opportunity to reorganize the bureaucracy along lines of function, eliminating departments and divisions that serve no public purpose. Instead, legislators are cowering from their responsibility.

“They would have been much more honest if they had done layoffs,” opined an angry Carl Leinonen, director of the Maine State Employees Association.

The honesty Mr. Leinonen seeks requires an understanding of the problem, an appreciation of its severity, and in this context, the will to act. It also demands courage. He will not find it in Augusta.