WAITING for the Cayetano administration just past Thanksgiving is the most dangerous season. The holidays will come and go, but Cayetano and his officials will be focused on the last rounds of contract negotiations with the state's public worker unions. Negotiations with
public worker unionsWage packages for 19,100 clerks, secretaries, school principals and professional employees are now going through arbitration. They may be talking turkey, but no one thinks these are going to be happy holidays.
The last time collective bargaining became such a serious matter, George Ariyoshi was governor. At that time, more than a decade ago, the state was facing an unprecedented strike, with every single public worker in the state threatening to walk.
To his credit, Ariyoshi held his ground and workers kept their jobs and got smaller-than-hoped-for raises. The state's finances rebounded and public workers took home some of the biggest union raises in the state when John Waihee was governor.
Now times and strategies have changed.
Here's this year's deal: The HGEA can't strike. The union presents its case to an arbitrator, the state gives its case and the arbitrator makes a decision, picking either labor or management's position, or fashioning a new settlement.
The state is then expected to put up the money.
The results are expected to be presented in early December. If they turn out like the last two rounds of binding arbitration, there could be trouble.
Already the 1,200 professional nurses employed by the state have won raises of slightly more than 4 percent.
Cayetano has argued that the state has no more money to spend on raises. The HGEA says its workers will accept 7 percent. The arbitrator is likely to come down with some increase for the public workers, according to labor observers.
Such a decision would hurt the credibility of the state, which had argued that it flat-out couldn't pay anything.
If public workers get a wage package, watch for it to become a battle at the Legislature.
The first time binding arbitration was tried in Hawaii, the firefighters won big raises, but then-Gov. Ariyoshi said it was too much.
He said that while he was bound to submit the package for funding, the Legislature should reject it, which it did.
So there is a chance that the new 1997 Legislature will be handling the most difficult, politically explosive wage package of the decade as soon as it opens shop in January.
ALREADY the always powerful HGEA is starting to "educate" legislators about the issues.
In the last election, the union worked hard to keep two friends, Donna Ikeda and Milton Holt, in the Legislature but failed. The union will now have to track the organization of the House and Senate if HGEA expects to gets a wage settlement.
For Cayetano, a wrong move or unintentional bluster at the union could be disastrous. If solving the political and labor question is difficult, handling the public's perception that the state is either caving in to big labor or trampling the rights of the worker calls for more skill and art than usually seen at the state Capitol.
Add to that the darkening clouds of the teacher and university professor negotiations. It is easy to see a season not of controversy, but outright danger.
