How a state government employee can get a 30 percent raise in just four years

The convoluted process of figuring out a unionized state government employee’s wages is a prime example of why the collective bargaining process needs more sunshine. While we wait for details on the contract that the state agreed to with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, it’s worth examining how to figure out...

The convoluted process of figuring out a unionized state government employee’s wages is a prime example of why the collective bargaining process needs more sunshine. While we wait for details on the contract that the state agreed to with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, it’s worth examining how to figure out a worker’s wages. The new contract will almost certainly have a similar process.

Media reports usually focus entirely on the general “across-the-board” pay hikes in government worker contracts. These are the equivalent of the pay increases most of us in the private sector receive.

But government employees, and in this case AFSCME employees, get pay hikes over and above the usual salary increases. These hikes are called “step” increases and employees get them just for being on the job another year. These costs are often ignored by the media.

Recognizing the impact of step increases is the key to understanding the cost of unionized government workers. In the most recent AFSCME contract, the automatic yearly step increases ranged from 2.7 to 5.5 percent, depending on one’s job classification and experience.

Let’s look at the pay history of a corrections officer assigned to a maximum-security facility and beginning work in July 2008. We’ll say he begins on Step One. As the nearby table indicates, this state employee will enjoy not just general pay increases, but additional step increases of 3.5 to 3.8 percent each year.

Quinn froze the across-the board pay increases beginning in July 2011. If he hadn’t, this corrections officer would have experienced a 34 percent pay increase during the lifetime of the most recent AFSCME contract.

Here’s what our prison guard’s pay increase history would have been between 2008 and 2012.

If the prison guard in our example had been limited to only the step increases with no salary increases, his total pay during the life of the most recent contract would have increased by 15 percent. Alternatively, if his pay had been limited to salary increases only with no steps, he would have experienced a 16 percent pay hike during the four years. Either of those alone put him ahead of the actual cost of living, which went up by less than 7 percent during the same period. And just keeping pace with the cost of living would have our prison guard doing better than many Illinoisans; median wages in Illinois have hardly kept up with the cost of living.

Odds are the old schedules will be carried into the new contract, only updated to reflect the new “across-the-board” pay hikes.
It is possible that the governor and the union agreed to tinker with the pay schedules in the new contract, making the steps more or less generous. Or they may have changed job titles to bump employees into more lucrative positions. Either one of those could make the contract far more lucrative for state employees and expensive for taxpayers than what is reported in the media.

There’s only one way to know for sure that none of that is happening: more transparency in the bargaining process. Fortunately state Rep. Jeanne Ives, R-Wheaton, has represented a package of bills that would up negotiations and contracts. This package deserves immediate action. The people of Illinois should be free to sit in on negotiating sessions, and should get to see contracts before they are made final.