The State Worker: Will minimum wage hit this month? Unlikely
jortiz@sacbee.com
Published Thursday, Jul. 01, 2010
The threat of minimum wage for state workers starting today, the beginning of the 2010-11 fiscal year, has been the Schwarzenegger administration's big stick in recent labor talks.
In 2003, the California Supreme Court said the state can withhold pay to the federal minimum until there's money appropriated for wages. No budget, no dough set aside for payroll.
Nothing personal or political, the governor has told the unions. This is the law. Cut deals with us now, or the law will fall on you. In some cases he's given unions offers with 24 hours to decide, up or down.
Six of 12 state unions have taken tentative deals with pension rollbacks and unpaid days off, just like the governor wants.
One sweetener to help swallow the concessions: promises that those unions are shielded from minimum wage.
But it's unlikely that minimum wage will hit state workers, at least this month.
Two reasons:
• Controller John Chiang. He refused to cut minimum-wage paychecks during the record-setting 2008 budget impasse, saying that it was not only impossible to carry out the order but that doing so would violate federal labor law. The administration sued. Seven months later, a judge said Chiang overstepped his authority. His maneuver fought off the order long enough for lawmakers to enact a budget.
Now an appellate court is reviewing that ruling and could issue a decision at any time. If Chiang loses, he could appeal to the state Supreme Court.
That would stall minimum wage pay for a while, but all Chiang needs is a three-week delay. The deadline for making payroll changes for all of this month is July 22.
By the way, the high court probably won't take the case, which questions the court's own decision.
"The conventional wisdom is that they take cases if they're looking to change something," says Sacramento labor lawyer Tim Yeung.
That's not impossible here, but it's unlikely.
• The Legislature. None of the unions will have binding contracts with minimum-wage protection in place this month. The rank and file and the Legislature need more time to vote on them.
So to shield those six unions from minimum-wage paychecks, Department of Personnel Administration Director Debbie Endsley said Monday, "We've agreed with the unions to give them a time-limited continuous appropriation."
But there's a problem: Appropriations aren't the governor's to "give." He'll need legislation to that effect.
If the legislation gets bogged down, the governor can issue the minimum-wage pay letters without protecting those six unions. Or he can hold off on them.
The first option would kill the tentative deals he's worked out. The second would contradict the governor's assertion that minimum wage is a matter of law, not politics.
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Popular Comment
John Chiang recklessly thumbs his nose at his boss, setting an irresponsible example and has now become Exhibit-A himself, proving that the big part of the entitlement problem state workers represent actually exists. To protect their interests they game the court system and hide behind unions instead of allowing free-capitalism and the free-market and the quality of their work to dictate their employment terms. State workers account for the single largest group of people in the great state of California engaged in budget-impacting collusion and conspiracy (in the form of out-dated, out-of-touch, ridiculous union labor contracts.) They use circular-logic arguments and other desperate measures of lameness to try to justify the fact that they bleed the state taxpayers in order to fund their cushy protected existence and gold-plated benefits that were dreamed up long ago in an era of utopia-society dreams fueled by unlimited-revenue which simply no longer exists. They are the biggest collective group of employees anywhere in California that, unlike everyone else, are protected from having to change with the times.-- BoxLunchAtTheWhy
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