Senate Pay Raises

The Albany Times Union has reported big pay raises for Senate staffers. They took place in the midst of the lost month due to the coup, and they were retroactive...Meaning that all the beneficiaries got a nice one-time lump-sum payment reflecting retroactive pay going back some months. I don't know the time interval involved.

Normally I'm a big supporter of paying people in government well. This includes Senators. Until June 8 I'd probably have supported a Legislative pay raise, not this year but in another year when we could absorb it better. Same for Senate staff.

However.....This raise is wildly inappropriate. A lot of the reasons for deeming it so have been covered elsewhere, but here's another one, something I learned yesterday.

The Public Management Internship (PMI) program has been "suspended":

http://www.cs.state.ny.us/pmi/

The PMI is basically a graduate school-level internship program for the State workforce. It is, literally, the future of the State workforce, the State's chance to recruit people out of graduate school before they get seduced by lucrative consulting positions. So far as I know, the Senate's version of the PMI, called the Senate Fellowship program, is still on for 2009-2010.

So, the fiscal crisis squeezed out the future of the State workforce (literally)....except for the future of the Senate's own workforce. And, oh by the way, it didn't squeeze out pay raises for the top Senate staffers. The mid-level and low-level staffers are often underpaid. But these top-level types? They were not underpaid by any standard, unless you're using Wall Street standards. And that's just....I mean come on now. Wall Street types are so often overpaid that comparing anyone to them is just asking for trouble.

Anyone remember the big pay raises for Governor Paterson's staffers some months back? Also inappropriate, for the same reason.

Under many circumstances I'd support pay raises for legislative staffers, and indeed for the legislators themselves. Some legislative staffers are underpaid, especially relative to the executive branch workforce, and to the private sector. (Despite publicity to the contrary, if you actually look at labor statistics, on average the private sector pays MORE than the public sector at least in terms of straight salary. When you think about it, though, the Senate staffers who got the raises weren't exactly underpaid to start, now were they.) Maybe even for the Executive Chamber. (Though it's hard to say that they are underpaid relative to ANYONE.)

But not in the middle of a fiscal crisis that has squeezed out the PMI program, and has caused the Governor to institute a hiring freeze and threaten layoffs and ask the unions to forego 3% pay raises and ask the Legislature to pass a Tier 5. In some cases, the total salary for people hired through the PMI was similar to the raises received by the Senate staffers!

And especially (with regard to the Senate staff raises) not when the Senate has proven itself to be dysfunctional in a way that it had until June 8 been only in the wildest dreams of "reformers."

Some depressing, disconcerting stuff.

At least wait until a better year, people. They were making high-5 or low-6 figures. They could afford to wait. The Senate's Democratic Majority is only going to expand from here, you have plenty of time to build a patronage mill. When you get started this early, people tend to take it the wrong way.