Public servants always get stuck with the cheque

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This article was published 27/03/2017 (3501 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Pity the public servants.

Our fellow citizens who make their livings in the employ of government at all levels have never been overly popular. But given the fiscal pressures facing both municipalities and the provincial government, it’s hardly surprising that 2017 is fast becoming a year of almost unparalleled conflict between public servants and government in Manitoba.

The city and its largest unions are at a stalemate. Negotiations with both CUPE 500, the single largest bargaining group in the city, and the Winnipeg Police Association have broken down. Talks with unions representing firefighters and middle managers are both headed to arbitration after attempts to reach a negotiated settlement failed.

Mayor Brian Bowman said recently that a $9.5-million shortfall from last year’s budget — the result of record snowfall in December — will require the city to freeze salaries for managers and non-unionized staff. But the austerity is apparently being applied to a much wider group of civic employees.

CUPE 500 officials claimed the city opened talks by asking for a 30 per cent wage rollback, an allegation the city will not confirm or deny. Talks between the city and the WPA are following a very similar tack. The WPA rejected the city’s latest wage offer — details have not been made public by either side — and immediately sought an arbitration hearing.

The battle over public sector compensation is also a top-of-mind concern for the provincial government, where legislation has been tabled to freeze wages for its unionized and non-unionized workers for two years. This accompanies layoffs of senior managers across the core civil service, and the elimination of 900 jobs at Manitoba Hydro.

Manitoba is hardly alone in this trend. Over the past few years, a number of provinces have frozen wages and trimmed the ranks of their public services. Just last week, Saskatchewan announced plans to seek a 3.5 per cent rollback of public sector wages.

The need for wage savings is also hardly unique to Manitoba. All provinces — and the federal government — are struggling to deal with anemic economies, slow growth in revenues and relentless upward pressure on the cost of providing core services. When revenues don’t grow fast enough to pay for the cost of services, something has to give. That something is almost always public sector wages.

And yet, one of the biggest problems with this approach is that it rarely provides government with the time to make thoughtful decisions around the number of people it employs and what they are paid.

Without that kind of analysis, government services will become less cost-effective, not more.

Governments are large, complex organizations. And like all large, complex organizations, they are in their very nature inefficient and wasteful. It takes time and an expert eye to strip government down to its essential functions and then identify the right number of people, at the right salary, to get the job done.

That kind of analysis is almost never part of the discussion when governments announce they are curbing public sector wages and laying off public sector workers. Government has a budget shortfall, and then calculates the savings from a wage freeze or a series of layoffs.

True cost-efficiency — which should be the goal of any wage controls or layoffs — requires a deeper analysis that must include an examination of both costs and the impacts of austerity measures on services. There is little evidence of that in Manitoba.

A good case in point: in pressing its case for legislated wage freezes, the current Progressive Conservative government of Premier Brian Pallister frequently complains that nearly 70 per cent of all expenditures are related to salaries and benefits.

That’s a lot, to be sure. And yet, what does it really mean?

Government is all about managing and delivering public services. As is the case in all service-based entities, the majority of its costs will always be associated with wages. How much should wages consume of total expenditures for a service-based operation like government? If Pallister knows, he certainly isn’t sharing. He only believes that it’s currently too high.

The same goes for Pallister’s war on the management class of the public service. The Tory government has alleged that senior management ranks at the province grew by nearly a third in the last decade of NDP rule. As a result, it has ordered all departments to cut their management ranks by 15 per cent.

Those numbers are deeply flawed, and in fact have never been fully substantiated. However, even if we accept the Tory allegation at face value, we are still left wondering: how that is evidence of waste or inefficiency?

To date, the Pallister government has refused to say exactly who these managers are and what they were doing. Without knowing that information, we can’t make a fair assessment of the decision to cut management ranks. The simple suggestions that growth in the numbers of managers is wasteful is fully and completely disingenuous.

The hyperbole that follows the election of new governments almost always suggests a new approach to solving old problems. The former government, or so the rhetoric goes, was bad at providing services. The new government will bring in a fresh set of eyes, innovative policies and a stricter dedication to prudence that can provide the same or better service at lower cost. This was exactly what Pallister and “Manitoba’s new government” pledged to do during last year’s provincial election campaign.

But to really deliver on a pledge of ‘better at less cost,’ you’d really need to take the time to identify areas of waste and solutions that allow a particular service to be sustained in a more cost-effective way.

The Pallister government has undertaken all manner of value-for-money audits to provide that exact kind of information, but to date has refused to share any of the results. That has not stopped the government from setting arbitrary targets for layoffs and wage freezes. The same holds true for the city, which has apparently identified targets for wage rollbacks without articulating the impact it would have on services.

The fiscal challenges faced by the city and province certainly require attention. But cutting wages and laying off workers is just the easiest route to addressing fiscal pressures. It is a strategy that provides short-term savings but also creates long-term problems with the erosion of public services.

At some point, some government is going to have to demonstrate it can make government better, and not just less costly.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca