[ OUR OPINION ]
Binding arbitration rule
should be challengedREPEAL of civil service reform by last year's Legislature is likely to result in exorbitant pay raises to state employees, and Democratic legislators under the reins of public employee unions are not about to change course. The only remedy against what Governor Lingle foresees as "budget busting" pay raises may be to challenge them in court. The state administration has a legal basis for rejecting unaffordable arbitrated pay increases and should consider doing so.
THE ISSUE
Republican legislators want restoration of civil service reforms that ended binding arbitration of wage disputes with public employees.
The 2000 Legislature enacted reforms proposed by then-Gov. Ben Cayetano that ended mandatory arbitration of contract stalemates involving nonessential state and county employees, restoring their right to strike. Since arbitration had been installed following a debilitating state employee walkout in 1979, a pattern had developed of unions asking for twice the amount of pay raises they wanted and being given half of what they asked. Only once, in 1983, did an arbitrator support the state's position, according to Ted Hong, Lingle's chief negotiator.
Last year's Legislature voted to repeal the reforms and went into a special session to override Lingle's veto of the repeal. The governor said afterward that she would ask the Legislature to place a ceiling on arbitrated pay increases, but such a measure has virtually no chance of being enacted. Legislators are not about to agree to such a "giveback" as long as they are controlled by public employee unions.
The state has entered binding arbitration with six collective bargaining units of the Hawaii Government Employees Association. An arbitrator recently awarded 5 percent yearly pay raises to prison guards, ambulance workers and licensed practical nurses represented by the United Public Workers union, costing taxpayers $15.5 million during a two-year period.
Lingle's only way of coping may be to play hardball under the terms of the mandatory-arbitration law. The statute requires the arbitration panel in a contract dispute to explain, in a written report, various factors used in arriving at its decision. Those factors include "the financial ability of the employer to meet these costs."
The law says further that the state's ability to pay salary increases approved by the arbitrators "shall not be predicated on the premise that the employer (the state) may increase or impose new taxes, fees or charges, or develop other sources of revenues." The state should insist that the arbitrators' reports specify the source of money to pay for the wage increases awarded.
House Speaker Calvin Say told legislators at the opening of this year's session that the House "will not approve any measures to raise taxes this year." The next day, Say told reporters that the Legislature's decision last year to renege on civil service reform "was an excellent decision in preventing government services from being curtailed."
Cayetano's admonition of four years ago is still relevant today: "So are we going to cut education? Cut welfare? How are you going to do this?"
