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Scientist Union's Talks Stall Over Pay
HughPickens.com writes: The Sacramento Bee reports that the labor contract between California's state government and the 2,800 employees represented by the California Association of Professional Scientists expired this week, spotlighting yet again the long-running feud over whether the tiny union's members should earn as much as their peers in federal and local governments and private industry. "It's a challenge to keep people motivated," says Rita Hypnarowski. "We talk about retaining the best and the brightest, but I can see that's not going to happen." A recent survey by the Brown administration found that the total compensation for half of state-employed chemists is less than $8,985 per month ($5,715 in salary, plus $3,270 in benefit costs). That's 33 percent less than the median total compensation for federal chemists, nearly 13 percent less than the midpoint for local-government chemists and almost 6 percent below the private sector.
Members of the union perform a wide variety of tasks, everything from fighting food-borne illnesses to mopping up the Refugio State Beach oil spill. For example, Cassandra McQuaid left a job last year at the Department of Public Health's state-of-the-art Richmond laboratories where she tracked foodborne illnesses. It's the kind of vital, behind-the-scenes work that goes unnoticed until an E. coli outbreak makes headlines and local health officials need a crack team of scientists to unravel how it happened. "It really came down to money," says McQuaid. "I just couldn't live in the Bay Area on a state salary."
Members of the union perform a wide variety of tasks, everything from fighting food-borne illnesses to mopping up the Refugio State Beach oil spill. For example, Cassandra McQuaid left a job last year at the Department of Public Health's state-of-the-art Richmond laboratories where she tracked foodborne illnesses. It's the kind of vital, behind-the-scenes work that goes unnoticed until an E. coli outbreak makes headlines and local health officials need a crack team of scientists to unravel how it happened. "It really came down to money," says McQuaid. "I just couldn't live in the Bay Area on a state salary."
If you work for the state, where do you HAVE to live in the bay area? Shouldn't the state alleviate the issue by having offices for these people in other, less expensive, areas of the state? You could attract a lot of people at a lower salary using quality of life as an attraction if you locate somewhere outside the major cities... there's a lot of California and all of it is not as expensive as the bay area.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"But what I'm getting at is when the government pays employees way above the per capita income of taxpayers."
I see your point, but I think is moot both in practical and ethical grounds because tax-to-wages is not a one-to-one map.
In practical, it's just a market, offer and demand: if you want the best (not that you *must* want them, maybe your needs are not up to the best and brigthest but *if* you need them), you need to have three things:
1) Have a selection process to filter out everybody but the best.
2) Have a process in place to detect the mistakes on point 1 above and/or those that, still being the best when hired, may be not the best now.
3) Offer the highest pay (not necessarily just money, other perks included) so the best apply to your selection process to start with.
And with regards to ethics, I don't see how someone can be comfortable paying, say, a bartender the same than to a, say, brilliant doctorate in something you really feel useful. It is not as if that any single doctor needs to be payed in full by any single bartender's taxes. It is still reasonable for an hypothetical town of "humble farmers" to pay their, say, doctor, or judge, or sheriff, above their own average income if they feel their value to the community is also above their own average.