Last week I posted Pioneer Institute’s recommendations for where Governor Patrick should begin cutting the state budget before he cuts safety net programs. One of our recommendations is to roll back the state’s workforce by the 6,000 employees it’s grown by since 2004.
Included in the comments on that post was the following:
You can’t cut 6,000 state jobs and not have it affect the most vulnerable.
Well, we wanted to provide actual data to determine whether that was true or not.
It turns out that less than 10% (581 out of the roughly 6,000) of the state hires made between 2004 and 2008 were in Health and Human Services. The bulk of the new hires (almost half) were in higher ed.
You can check out the numbers yourself here.
We prefer that Health and Human Services funding be kept in communities. It is better to work through human services vendors who have contracts with the state. There are literally hundreds of them, who fall under the umbrella of trade organizations like the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers. These organizations do good work.
We would never want to be blase about the topic of layoffs, but would honestly ask the question whether it isn’t better to lay off folks in state offices in Boston than cancel contracts or choose not to reup with human service providers in the field.
Liam Day
Director of Communications
Pioneer Institute
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p>2. Of those “581” human service employess who provide direct care, how many have now been laid off, and “what were they” – are they DCF [was DSS] case workers? DMH Case managers? DMR case managers? What?
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p>3. Where are the other 5500?
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p>4. What is your data source?
Amberpaw, your first two questions are both great questions. Unfortunately, I just don’t have answers for them. We rely on publicly available information and what I posted is about as granular as I can get. (Someone else might have better researching and investigative skills than I.)
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p>The source of the data is the financial disclosure the state is obligated to make for its general debt. If you click through to the document linked to in the post and scroll down to page 11 (the whole document is 18 pages) it breaks down the budget-funded payroll by department. Unfortunately, it does not go so far as to break it down by salary.
Liam D.
The gov makes around 150K. Yet scores of ceos of the private non profits make more, some times double and even triple what the gov. makes. The average direct care worker makes about 24K. Shouldn’t we use this fiscal crisis to reign in the obscene ceo pay? Its all tax dollars afterall. If we cut the ceo pay in half we could save millions with out harming one client.
What’s wrong with that?
I would ask whether reducing non-profit CEO pay might not dilute the number of qualified non-profit CEOs. In the past, the non-profit trade off always was that, no, you won’t make as much money as you might, say, working for Fidelity, but that your quality of life (i.e. the hours you work) is better. However, I don’t know if that’s true anymore. Non-profit CEOs often work the same ridiculously long hours as for-profit CEOs. If they’re really good at what they do, but don’t get compensated for it, well, why wouldn’t they start looking for something in the for-profit world.
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p>To put it another way, look at Dan Grabauskas. Whether or not you think he’s doing a good job managing the T, I don’t think anyone can argue that at, I believe, $225,000 he is overpaid. The T is a management nightmare. Someone managing a similarly sized operation in the private sector (same number of employees, yearly revenue, etc.) would be making easily 10 times that amount.