Well techically they form associations, but can't do strike for do much collective bargaining. Anyway, this should warm some hearts and bring some smiles to faces.
http://www.connectmidmissouri.com/news/story.aspx?id=1195982#.VTvkZpPQuEI
Quote
JEFFERSON CITY -- State employees said Friday they were disappointed but not surprised to learn Missouri's 2016 budget keeps their wages flat.
No state worker was willing to give their name, but several KRCG 13 spoke with expressed frustration that their pay would remain unchanged for the fourth time in the last 7 budget years. One woman wondered aloud, "Don't we have any value?"
Jeff Mazur, the executive director for the local American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees council, said it would take a long-term effort to turn the state's worker pay around. Mazur said Missouri ranks 34th nationwide in cost of living but last in worker pay. He said it would take a $5,500-per-year pay increase to make Missouri's state workers the 34th-highest-paid within one year.
"Obviously, everyone knows that's not going to happen in a single budget year," he said.
Mazur said there is growing bipartisan support for a pay raise for state workers, with GOP Reps. Jay Barnes and Travis Fitzwater and Democratic Sen. Jamilah Nasheed among those calling for one. Still, he said it will likely take at least 4 or 5 budget years before Missouri's state employee pay corresponds to its cost of living.
I'm actually a bit suprirsed MO is the 34th most expensive state.
Huh, on the plus side, since you happened to make me look it up, according to Forbes it turns out the COL in Pittsburgh is pretty much exactly the same as it is in Columbia. How is that possible? It's a horrible urban hellhole. :wacko:
Quote from: Ideologue on April 25, 2015, 02:07:23 PM
I'm actually a bit suprirsed MO is the 34th most expensive state.
St. Louis and KC.
I thought they were post-apocalyptic bartertowns operating largely off of methane farming and police piracy.
Quote from: Ideologue on April 25, 2015, 02:11:41 PM
I thought they were post-apocalyptic bartertowns operating largely off of methane farming and police piracy.
They have nicer parts too.
Quote from: Ideologue on April 25, 2015, 02:09:38 PM
Huh, on the plus side, since you happened to make me look it up, according to Forbes it turns out the COL in Pittsburgh is pretty much exactly the same as it is in Columbia. How is that possible? It's a horrible urban hellhole. :wacko:
Pittsburgh isn't that much better.
Sad trombone.
34th in cost of living, and 50th in pay?
That isn't that radical a difference.
I wonder what public employee pay in Missouri is like compared to private sector?
How many times has the average privat sector worker in comparable jobs seen raises over the last seven years?
What metric are they using to measure pay and cost of living?
Quote from: Berkut on April 25, 2015, 05:23:59 PM
34th in cost of living, and 50th in pay?
That isn't that radical a difference.
I wonder what public employee pay in Missouri is like compared to private sector?
How many times has the average privat sector worker in comparable jobs seen raises over the last seven years?
What metric are they using to measure pay and cost of living?
I don't know a thing about Missouri pay for public workers, but I don't think state workers generally have all that sweet of a gig. Not like federal at least. I at least know in Georgia the pay for state workers in my field is abysmal.
Maybe in states like New York or Massachusetts it is different.
Quote from: Berkut on April 25, 2015, 05:23:59 PM
34th in cost of living, and 50th in pay?
That isn't that radical a difference.
I wonder what public employee pay in Missouri is like compared to private sector?
How many times has the average privat sector worker in comparable jobs seen raises over the last seven years?
What metric are they using to measure pay and cost of living?
I hate comparing two different rankings like this. There's no way to tell how significant the difference is. It's a pretty useless comparison.
Quote from: alfred russel on April 25, 2015, 05:48:25 PM
Quote from: Berkut on April 25, 2015, 05:23:59 PM
34th in cost of living, and 50th in pay?
That isn't that radical a difference.
I wonder what public employee pay in Missouri is like compared to private sector?
How many times has the average privat sector worker in comparable jobs seen raises over the last seven years?
What metric are they using to measure pay and cost of living?
I don't know a thing about Missouri pay for public workers, but I don't think state workers generally have all that sweet of a gig. Not like federal at least. I at least know in Georgia the pay for state workers in my field is abysmal.
Maybe in states like New York or Massachusetts it is different.
In New York I think (depending on the profession) the pay is not as good as the private sector, but the benefits are incredible and of course you cannot be fired no matter how terrible you are...
In Missouri, you can get fired fairly easily from the state. We've had rounds of lay offs.
Quote from: Ideologue on April 25, 2015, 02:07:23 PM
I'm actually a bit suprirsed MO is the 34th most expensive state.
Should it be higher or lower? :huh:
Keep in mind, the big, empty western states will have higher distribution costs.
Quote from: Berkut on April 25, 2015, 06:52:38 PM
In New York I think (depending on the profession) the pay is not as good as the private sector, but the benefits are incredible and of course you cannot be fired no matter how terrible you are...
I'd guess there are states where state workers are very poorly compensated, and states where they are getting sweet deals. I'd also guess that if Missouri is really 50th in state pay, the workers there are not very well off.
I'm surprised that they are 50th though. The state isn't especially poor, and isn't hardcore conservative either. The source seems to be a union guy in Missouri quoted in a connectmidmissouri online article, so who knows.
Knowing the limited amount that I do about state employment in Georgia for accountants, I think the workers are woefully underpaid.
I suspect there are at least 20 states who are all 50th in worker pay.
Any reason for this suspicion?
Okay, so I'm a provincial employee who is not in a union (albeit the vast majority of Alberta public servants are). I'm quite content with that status.
The thing is - the state / province is still subject to the labour market. If they pay well, they'll get top employees. If they pay poorly, they'll get shitty employees.
One thing I disagree with is the "whatever you do you can't be fired" notion. Not that it isn't true in certain circumstances - it is. But if unions exist to protect shitty employees from getting fired, then I really question why you have a union. In my job we are not immune from being fired. I know several lawyers who have been let go - not as part of layoffs, but the individuals were specifically let go.
A while back I read about a New York school's "rubber room." It's where they dumped teachers they didn't want teaching but didn't believe they could fire because of the appeal process. So they assigned them to sit in this one room and do nothing all day.
We call that "to do corridors" over here (public workers with nothing to do, just walking up and down the corridors of the building). It used to happen a lot in Spanish state tellies, for example. Most of their personnel (writers, cameramen, postproduction, etc...) had no incentive to keep up with their skills, since they had guaranteed employment. So the public tellies ended up with a staff of hundreds that they couldn't use for anything more complex than the test card. Hence the tellies were forced to hire external personnel (like me), while their own staff was left idle.
It's slowly getting better now, since they lost their unsackable status in a reform a few years ago, which certainly lit a fire on their arse.
Quote from: celedhring on April 26, 2015, 05:14:38 PM
We call that "to do corridors" over here (public workers with nothing to do, just walking up and down the corridors of the building). It used to happen a lot in Spanish state tellies, for example. Most of their personnel (writers, cameramen, postproduction, etc...) had no incentive to keep up with their skills, since they had guaranteed employment. So the public tellies ended up with a staff of hundreds that they couldn't use for anything more complex than the test card. Hence the tellies were forced to hire external personnel (like me), while their own staff was left idle.
It's slowly getting better now, since they lost their unsackable status in a reform a few years ago, which certainly lit a fire on their arse.
That sounds like a bunch of BS to me - I have it on good authority that union workers all work harder than non-union, and guaranteeing someone a job never, or at worst only rarely, results in anyone working any less diligently.
Everyone should get tenure. If that happened, everything would be so much better for everyone.
Union rules in state TV were some of the most boneheaded stuff I have encountered. For example, to cover news they forced the telly to send the equivalent of a full football team to cover the event, where a guy with a camera and a reporter would have sufficed. Camera guy, guy to help camera guy, sound guy, guy to help sound guy, producer, reporter, van driver... the lot. Since the telly had to pay travel expenses and bonuses to all the people they sent to cover news, it came to a point where the telly actually *saved* money by hiring an external ENG and telling its own personnel to pick their noses and "do corridors". Of course, the unions would then cry foul.
Another one. In order to prevent the fact that state tellies were forced to hire so much external personnel, instead of relaxing union rules *another* rule came where somebody hired for 6 months had to be hired permanently by the telly. So tellies started to play merry-go-round with their external people in order to not get saddled with more permanent staff, which made things even harder.
You know, I'm quite pro-union in concept, but sometimes they make it really hard in practice.
Anyway, the whole thing ended up crashing down quite horribly and got reformed a few years ago. They are now treated as private sector employees, although it will still be a few years until public tellies finish transitioning to a more rational structure.
The sad thing is the public sector is pretty much the only employer in Spain where labour laws are consistently followed. Millions want to escape from the private sector, and it rarely is because they want to sit on their asses all day.
Yeah, that is true. When I worked for TVE, they were extremely scrupulous about that - as opposed to some of the private tellies where I worked in, which for example sometimes broke minimum rest periods between shooting days (which is a pretty dangerous thing to do).
However, what happened in state TV underlines one of Spain's chronic problems. When the law isn't followed, we answer with more and stricter laws, instead of just making it so the current ones are abided to. In the case of labor laws, this forced "good faith" employers like the public sector to be increasingly saddled by more and more regulations, which were ignored in other places.
Quote from: Iormlund on April 26, 2015, 06:18:18 PM
The sad thing is the public sector is pretty much the only employer in Spain where labour laws are consistently followed. Millions want to escape from the private sector, and it rarely is because they want to sit on their asses all day.
I don't think the people sitting on their asses all day now in public sector unions went in to the job because they wanted to sit on their asses all day.
But given the opportunity....some of them will. Especially if actually DOING the job is challenging work.
Quote from: Berkut on April 26, 2015, 05:43:13 PM
Quote from: celedhring on April 26, 2015, 05:14:38 PM
We call that "to do corridors" over here (public workers with nothing to do, just walking up and down the corridors of the building). It used to happen a lot in Spanish state tellies, for example. Most of their personnel (writers, cameramen, postproduction, etc...) had no incentive to keep up with their skills, since they had guaranteed employment. So the public tellies ended up with a staff of hundreds that they couldn't use for anything more complex than the test card. Hence the tellies were forced to hire external personnel (like me), while their own staff was left idle.
It's slowly getting better now, since they lost their unsackable status in a reform a few years ago, which certainly lit a fire on their arse.
That sounds like a bunch of BS to me - I have it on good authority that union workers all work harder than non-union, and guaranteeing someone a job never, or at worst only rarely, results in anyone working any less diligently.
Everyone should get tenure. If that happened, everything would be so much better for everyone.
I have it on good authority that some people suspect that state workers in lie about their rate of pay.