30 Comments - thechampaignlife - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 8:28 am: I’ve never understood why state university employees are never included in the state job numbers. I believe the real number of state workers is close to 100k. Oh, and U of I workers have to pay to park sometimes over a mile away and take the bus so most here would gladly take a 2 block walk! - Rich Miller - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 8:40 am: ===I’ve never understood why state university employees are never included in the state job numbers=== Different pension system, no direct state control over line items, plus they get tuition and federal aid, etc. It’s not that difficult. - wordslinger - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 8:52 am: Just like it makes sense to have some strictly political hires, it’s reasonable that some government management positions should be excluded from unions. Somebody has to be the boss. - Tom Smith - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 8:59 am: The parking lot in question is to small for the amount of people who use it. I say make them walk. I also say parking should be free. - Fed up - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 9:15 am: Funny the articles don’t mention Quinn taking cash and an endorsement from the union in exchange for job guarantees right before the election in a pay to play scheme that was more brazen then blagos. - Tom Joad - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 9:49 am: The unionization of all state employees was a Blago deal with the unions. Putting mid level supervisors in the union when they were in charge of writing up evaluations of union workers they supervise is just absurd and counter-productive. The directors have been complaining about this for a long time. This idea should be rolled back. - Reality Check - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 9:50 am: @Fed Up, are you talking about the Jan. ‘10 agreement for wage deferrals, furlough days and health care savings in exchange for no layoffs? The agreement that was signed shortly before the gov primary…in which the union did not endorse Quinn? Or are you just parroting Brady’s phony spin of the Sept extension of that agreement that saved the state even more money? Try to come back with some facts. - Irish - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 10:34 am: Tom Joad @9:49 - The writing of evaluations has very little to do with it. Most of the front line evaluations in my agency are written by those folks supervisors who have been in the union since back in the 70’s. The evaluations are checked and also signed by the lowewr end management person and sent up the chain. It has worked fine. We have also had grievances that have been filed, one union member VS another and those have been handled the same as those between union member and non-union member. The lower management folks who were put in the union during the Blago era were in limbo in the middle of the traditional union employees and the Rutan exempt political hires. They had nowhere to turn, they could not seek political help as they were a Rutan covered position. Yet they had no protection from their supervisors as they were not in a union. The key point in deciding if they could be in a union was could they make policy and could they affect policy change. They did not. An example of their influence can be summed as follows. I had a seasonal worker who walked off the job, took a set of keys, did not return for two weeks. I sent in a termination slip on that individual, and requested Law enforcement retrieve the keys. I recceived a call from Springfield and was told in no uncertain terms that I did not have the authority to terminate this person, Springfield would do it. Three days later the keys were used to break into the shop and about $5,000.00 worth of equipment was stolen. I had to justify all the security steps I had taken perevent this and was questioned several times as to whenther I could have done more. Added to that was the fact that we had gone 5 years with no increase not even a COLA increase while all of the rest of the state was getting them. Most of the time the political hires were getting better than a COLA increase. In many cases the folks in this group were making quite a bit less than the people they supervised even though they had years more seniority. - Springfield Skeptic - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 11:02 am: I have been a mid management supervisor for over 15 years. Until my PSA (1) job title was absorbed into the union I watched over the years as all of the people I supervised overtook and passed me in salary. When the union took in my title I was estatic. Finally, finally I can get a raise. It was 5 years with practically nothing while my employees salary jumped almost 25% during that period. Does anyone wonder why people in higher and higher job titles are asking to be taken into the union? - Cincinnatus - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 11:19 am: - Springfield Skeptic - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 11:02 am: “Does anyone wonder why people in higher and higher job titles are asking to be taken into the union?” I don’t. As rational individuals, you all are certainly entitled and expected to act in your own best interest. However, I think you have hit a nail on the head that you may not have intended. You were treated separately, differently, and more poorly than your union employees because they were in the union and you were not. If they were not in the union, their pay may have been lower and more in line with your pay, and merit pay money would have been available for those employees exceeding expectations, including yourself. This approach may incentivize all state employees, while lowering overall employment costs to the citizenry. Those union employees may also have had $5k more in their paychecks if they did not have to funnel their money to unions, who then used those monies to lobby politicians in a feedback loop that skews results and screws taxpayers. You may see your unionization as a panacea, or at least a tremendous benefit to you, and quite frankly so would I in your position. I see your unionization as yet another instance where government works against the common good of its citizens, and contributed to our current financial problems. - Retired Non-Union Guy - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 11:44 am: The blunt fact is most the so-called “middle management” in the State don’t have any authority to do anything … can’t hire, can’t fire, can’t make policy, can’t allocate money from one project to another … and the evaluation process was a joke with pre-determined quotas and outcomes … everything had to be approved at the highest levels. This is nothing new, it was that way most of the 35+ years I worked at the State. Being tasked with the “responsibility” for things without being given the authority was the main reason I tried to stay out of management in (non-union) technical titles most of my career … as I describe it, I was in management 2 1/2 times. And I had it good compared to a lot of managers … So I have no problem with PSA’s and even SPSA’a being in the union … in most cases, regardless of their skills, they are allowed to be nothing more than glorified paper shufflers and errand boys. - Irish - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 11:54 am: Cincinnatus - Merit pay looks great on paper. Merit pay might work in a corporate setting. Merit Pay does not work in state government in Illinois. The premise of Merit Pay is that as the employee does better work they get more pay. It is an incentive based system. However in State government it is not that. For fifteen years every time evaluations came around I was told by several different supervisors, You have done a great job, thank you very much, I would like to give you a superior rating but my budget does not allow it. So I will have to give you a meets expectations rating because that is the percentage increase I can afford to give you. So my increase was not tied to my work it was tied to how much money they had left in the pot to give out. If your evaluation came late in the fiscal year your percentage was lower. In the latter years just before we became unionized the administration changed the way the ratings and percentages were paired. No matter what your rating you could get anywhwere from a 1% increase to a 5% increase for having a Superior rating, A meets expectations could be anywhere from a 0% to a 3.5% increase. So you could get a superior rating and get a 1% increase and someone else could get a meets rating and get a 3% increase. Merit Comp my *(%. - Cincinnatus - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 12:03 pm: Irish, I think you are demonstrating my point. Since the union receives a contractually obligated raise (and guaranteed benefits and pensions where the contribution is below the national average), the budget that can be used to reward excellent employees is not available. And while I agree that the public sector is not the same as the private sector, there does not seem to be any use of defensible metrics to determine program effectiveness (shocking but their may be programs that should be eliminated or changed) and other such measurable attributes. At least the private sector uses profitability in its calculation, along with other attributes. I would like to see the best government employees do better. I would also like to see the slugs replaced. I would like to see government and private sector employees have rough parity in wages and benefits. Public service unions, with their built-in conflict of interest, skew this result. - D.P. Gumby - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 12:24 pm: this is a great example of how I have learned from this group. I didn’t have the direct experience to understand who the “middle management” people were or what the “sides” of this debate meant. Now, it seems that the issue is much more complicated that is being presented in the press (big surprise). Thanks folks - lincolnlover - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 12:29 pm: Cincinnatus - The flaw in your logic is that state employees work for politicians who, given the opportunity, hire their friends, family and donors. Those folks often do not know or care how to do the job, and the work is pushed onto the people who do. Now what do you think happens at review time?? That’s right. The boss hands out his merit comp and you get screwed while the political hacks get the big raises. This is why government employees SHOULD be in a union - at least they have some recourse to fairness in a politician dominated universe. - A Voter - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 12:30 pm: Irish’s example of an employee with a meets expectation rating getting a larger increase than an employee that got a superior rating is a good example of exactly what to expect, if there are no unions. Without unions, the employees that back the party in charge will get the larger increases, while employees backing the minority party may not get any increases, no matter how great an employee they are. If what you want is a huge patronage system, get rid of the union and that is exactly what you will get. - Pat Robertson - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 12:37 pm: Cincinnatus, merit comp actually worked pretty well prior to Blagojevich. The problems now, and the reason every merit comp employee who has any argument that they can join the union has applied to do so, is that Blagojevich came in and immediately cut merit comp wages across the board and froze them, and then gave AFSCME the most generous contract you can imagine. He later loosened up on the pay freeze a little, but then Quinn came in, reinstated the pay freeze, imposed furlough days, let the union off the hook on layoffs in exchange for deferring part of their pay raises, got caught giving huge raises to his own people, and responded by doubling the furlough days for merit comp. So many have joined the unions, others have left or retired and cannot be replaced because no union employee will accept a promotion and any outsider competent to do the job would be too smart to walk into this mess. So the agency heads shuffle the remaining merit comp employees around, give them extra jobs, and fight to keep them out of the union, and whine about how they can’t get things done. The current problem has nothing to do with budgets or union employees taking up available funds, except to the extent that if (and that is one huge if) Quinn actually wanted to try to make it up to the merit comp employees today, the budget mess would cause horrible PR over him spending a couple of million dollars on lazy state employees. - Irish - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 12:45 pm: If your point is that the political hires that are the administrations of each agency do not care how their employees fare, they are only concerned with making their bosses look good and getting them re-elected. And if your point is that the politically hired and motivated administrations will never do anything that is not politically beneficial to their bosses and as a result would never better the positions of those that work for them unless they had to. And if your point is that the taxpaying public would not, on their own, improve the position of state employees and would if possible always keep them in a lower stature than said taxpaying public, while also requiring them to serve every whim of that taxpaying public, because as has been told to me on numerous occasions, “you have to because I pay your salary.” And if your point is that, whereas in the private sector corporations are mandated to follow safety and health laws by any number of agencies of the State of Illinois or they are fined, in state government they are immune because they are state government and therefore the only protections an employee has are those brought by the unions. And if your point is that the only protection any state empoloyee has is through union representation. Then, yes I am making your point. As for the programs you mention. I would like to know of one program that was initiated by a state employee from mid management down. The programs that you indicate could be cut most likely were started by administration staff or the GA. Since many times on this site it has been shown that private sector employees make more than their public sector counterparts, I welcome your move to have public sector workers make equal to the private sector. - cassandra - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 12:47 pm: I guess the state appellate defenders whose jobs are ending (news feed) musn’t be in the union. Otherwise, under Governor Pat’s no-layoff agreement with AFSCME, we’d have to keep them on anyway, at least until June 30, 2012, when the contract runs out. And for its members, AFSCME will probably be demanding permanent no-layoff agreements along with mega-raises, free parking, and so forth when negotiations commence. It’s their way. And Governor Pat is their guy. If the SPSA’s are really doing high-level management work, then the state’s lawyers should be able to prove their case in labor court, or wherever collective bargaining initiatives are decided. If Illinois state government is so dysfunctional that everybody but the guv and the agency heads qualifies to be in the union because they to make all decisions (hiring, firing, and so on), then we are being very poorly served by our governmental structure. As we are, actually. Time for a broad management redo. - lincolnlover - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 1:00 pm: Actually, I expect the union to be looking at a no-layoff agreement, coupled with concessions on wages and health care. I could go along with that. But what we are talking about is why are so many state employees in a union? My boss of 22 years was mid-management, non-union, until @5 years ago. She had not had a raise for 8 years, and that was before the recession, not because there was no money, but because her boss gave most of his merit comp to just 2 managers (who happen to be related to him). Before they unionized, I actually made about $300 a month more than she did. In addition, without a union, no one stands up and says “24 freakin furlough days - are you crazy - I can’t give up a month of salary!!” Please read and believe: WE WORK FOR POLITICIANS! - Irish - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 1:01 pm: Cassandra - A perfect example of how dysfunctional it is; Even at this point in time with everything that has gone on, and all the articles in the paper, when asked why something is closed or some service has been cut back I cannot say ” because our budget has been cut.” or “I don’t have enough staff to do that.” - cassandra - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 1:21 pm: I thought that the determining factor for the judge or board which decides this issue (is the state job union or nonunion) had to do with the responsibilities and level of independence of the job, not the salary. So the fact that union members made more than non-union members in some cases was not and is not relevant to the decision of whether the job in the union. Again, the problem in Illinois seems to be that only the governor and the cabinet heads and a few others perhaps can make any critical decisions in Illinois state govt. In fact, I’m not sure that even an agency head can fire anybody–doesn’t CMS have to approve it? By filing for inclusion in the bargaining unit, the SPSA’s and the PSA supervisors are exposing how dysfunctional and backward the system really is. - lincolnlover - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 1:28 pm: Authority to hire and fire rests with the designated manager. CMS has to approve it only in light of ensuring that the contract and laws are followed, much like the HR department in a private company. Again, unions protect their members from arbitrarily being fired for being a member of the wrong political party. - anon - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 1:42 pm: The quote from Rep. Currie (“If you want to run the ship of state, you have to have people who are able to stay past 5 o’clock, who are committed to working overtime and who, if privy to information that is important, have a clear allegiance and loyalty to the government, not to their union local,”)………HOW out of touch can you be….can you honestly thing these people are going to have alligance to the State and work after 5 o’clock if you take them out of the union, don’t give them pay raise, pay them 25% less than subordinate staff and ask them to take 24 furlough days. Come out. Get in touch with reality. “we need people to - cassandra - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 1:58 pm: lincolnlover Who signs the discharge papers? I don’t think it’s the PSA supervisor. But assuming that you are correct and the PSA can fire on his/her own—how did they get into the union, where the Dems and Blago put them a few years ago. - Retired Non-Union Guy - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 2:11 pm: For those with short memories, about 25 years ago (more or less, my memory may be off on the time frame) the State tried a true merit system where managers had the ability to reward exceptional employees with raises up to 13% and also the ability to give 0% if it was warranted. What happened was the good managers gave all their good people who had been held back for many years raises and the bad managers gave those kinds of raises to the political hacks. The result was what you might have expected; the budgeting and personnel departments panicked at the cost and limited it to 3 - 5% or less from then on. - thechampaignlife - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 5:14 pm: @Rich: I don’t mean this to come off as argumentative because I’m genuinely interested in understanding the reasoning (not that it’s your job to educate me), but couldn’t they be on a common pension? Couldn’t the legislature have line item control? Aren’t driver’s license fees and federal matching grants akin to tuition and aid? I guess I just don’t see why a distinction was ever made and it seems more logical to group everyone together to minimize redundancies and simplify administration. - Ain't No Justice - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 5:27 pm: Blago holdovers…..I heard a Director over at Human Services resigned. Wonder if it had to do with the recent death(s). There are still more hacks at the top there for sure. Why not go into the union….then you are not only Politically safe but Union safe too. - AC - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 7:25 pm: If technical staff are removed from the union, and replaced by contractual staff at a higher costs to taxpayers, will the state be further ahead? If the legislation is as poorly written as the similar bill introduced in January, it would impact nurses, IT professionals, accountants, and others who don’t supervise or spend a very small amount of their time performing supervisory duties. How many of the most skilled and knowledgeable union staff will be willing to take a promotion to a position that isn’t in the union? How many people coming from outside the state would choose a position with no raises and ever increasing furlough days over a union title? - Me - Monday, Mar 21, 11 @ 8:55 pm: Honestly what we have now with the PSA’s in the union isn’t any better than what we had before. Before we had political hacks. Now we have unqualified union dopes who get the job based on their senority. They need to kick the PSA’s back out and then raise salaries to attract talent. Perhaps then the state would get on the road to recovery. Sorry, comments for this post are now closed.