At $80,500, the median annual state-employee salary in Washington is higher than the median annual private-sector pay in 38 of our state’s 39 counties.
People often seem surprised when Republicans share that fact, but here’s something else that deserves more attention than it’s received: State employees are on track to benefit from a multibillion-dollar package of pay raises at the same time that the state government is facing a multibillion-dollar budget shortfall.
Recently, and perhaps unwittingly, the House Democrats made it a lot easier to call attention to these anticipated pay raises.
They did so in a way that suggests they are willing to fund these wage increases for state employees even if it requires what they describe as “disastrous” or “catastrophic” cuts to important programs.
An online campaign just launched by the House Democrats uses a proposal from the state’s now-former governor, Jay Inslee, to show how a state budget might look if the shortfall was addressed through cuts alone.
For example, they prominently proclaim how their all-cuts example would eliminate $3.5 billion for health care and public-health programs over the next four years.
Yet, they are completely silent about how the Inslee proposal makes sure to include $4 billion for funding the labor agreements produced this past fall by collective bargaining between Inslee and the assorted state-employee unions.
In exchange for giving state workers a 3% general pay raise for 2025, 2% for 2026, and continuing the generous 85%-15% split of health-care premiums, the Democrats’ all-cuts example could — quoting from the website they created just for this purpose — mean “catastrophic cuts to Medicaid, health care and public health funding in Washington state, eliminating or significantly reducing key programs that keep people alive and healthy, leading to unaccounted for costs in the future.”
The House Democrats also go on about how their all-cuts example would take $1.5 billion from long-term care and developmental disabilities programs, $1.3 billion from human services and early learning, $376 million from corrections and $365 million from behavioral-health services.
Add those up and you get a loss of $3.54 billion — but again, no mention is made of how the $4 billion for state-worker pay raises is protected.
If legislators fund the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) as they are, someone earning the $80,500 median salary today will get $86,613 in two years. That number is likely to still be higher than the corresponding private-sector salary in every county other than King.
It would be easy to criticize the CBAs as a case of the rich getting richer. On one hand, that isn’t fair. State employees should be properly compensated, and the labor unions are doing their jobs when they try to negotiate the best possible deal for their members.
Still, when state employees are among the highest-paid people in a community, it’s not going to go unnoticed, especially if core public services are being cut so pay raises can proceed.
The House Democrats haven’t said they would be willing to raise taxes to make sure the CBAs are funded.
No one should expect that to change. It is safer politically to talk about the “need for revenue,” as the Democrats’ new campaign puts it, as a way to avoid cuts being threatened to core services.
That kind of fear-mongering is right out of the tax-and-spend playbook.
The $4 billion in CBAs also help explain why Republicans and Democrats view the budget situation so differently.
We see the shortfall as $6.7 billion over four years, because the non-partisan budget staffs in the Senate and House calculated that as the gap to be filled if we’re to keep state government running at the same level going forward as it is today.
The House Democrats would have known about that $6.7 billion estimate in early December, just like we did — so how did they get to the $12 billion figure that has been one of their talking points since before this session began?
It seems they took the non-partisan staff’s calculation, added the $4 billion because of CBAs, and threw in another billion or so dollars for some new policies.
Our Democratic colleagues seem to view the labor agreements as untouchable commitments that simply must be included among the state’s spending obligations, and therefore become part of the shortfall.
Not so. State law requires the CBAs to come before the Legislature for approval, and that question is typically rolled into the package of votes that must be taken to produce a new budget.
Washington law also requires the director of the governor’s budget office to certify that CBAs are “financially feasible,” meaning the state has the money to fund them.
The trouble is, “feasible” isn’t defined in the law, although Republicans have tried to fix that as recently as this session.
As a result, the determination of feasibility can easily end up being based on political calculations instead of mathematical calculations — although in 2008, then-Gov. Christine Gregoire’s budget office did declare the labor agreements that had been negotiated were not financially feasible.
The argument that the CBAs are still subject to change rather than written in stone is also supported by another part of state law.
It allows labor agreements to be reopened if a “significant revenue shortfall” is proclaimed by the governor. That too has happened before — in 2010, also by former Gov. Gregoire, a Democrat.
No one, however, should expect the Democrats of today to make use of the legal safety valves that could lower the enormous cost of the CBAs negotiated by Inslee.
Aside from the immediate implications it presents for people who pay taxes and receive services in our state, this situation provides another example of how the method for determining state-employee compensation is badly in need of reform.
A quarter-century ago, the process was time-consuming but transparent because legislators were literally involved in the negotiations. That changed radically under former Governor Locke, so that lawmakers now get only an up-or-down vote on deals struck behind closed doors between the governor and labor leaders who control massive amounts of campaign cash.
Something is incredibly wrong if it takes huge tax increases, or “disastrous” cuts to important programs, to make state-employee pay raises financially feasible. But that’s the choice found between the lines of the House Democrats’ online campaign and all-cuts example.
The “sky is falling” approach has been used many times to promote new and higher taxes. But this has an extra layer, because it’s about forcing everyone in our state to pay more, simply to give raises to a select group.
There’s no promise of new or better service delivery, just bigger paychecks to do the same jobs at a time when those dollars are needed elsewhere. That is not the way to make our state better.
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Sen. John Braun of Centralia serves the 20th Legislative District, which spans parts of four counties from Yelm to Vancouver. He became Senate Republican leader in 2020.
