“Did Charlie Baker take a pay cut? Did Charlie Baker take a furlough? Has he asked his management team to do more with less? And yet he’s castigating public employees who have in fact given to help us get through this economic crisis. To me this guy is like Pinocchio. He’s not being honest about his role in the Big Dig, the role of how Harvard Pilgrim recovered and his misstatements continuously are factually incorrect.”…
… During an appearance on the same show last week, Baker encountered a caller named “Erica” who, after identifying herself as a state health and human services employee, asked Baker about where he would cut 5,000 jobs and how that promise factored into his campaign theme of job creation.
Baker said many state agencies were working at “cross-purposes” while serving the same populations and told the caller that “lots” of people in municipal government and the private sector had taken “big reductions” in salaries and wages over the past two years. Then he asked her if she knew anyone in state government who had experienced a reduction. When Erica said she had taken a pay cut, Baker said, “I’m glad you did that. And I think that makes you the exception to the rule based on my understanding of what took place.”
I work for Tim Murray’s committee. Not sure why my digital signature is not appearing.
I frequently forget that as I write them myself. Glad you posted this — and doubly glad the LG picked up the story. Hopefully, Erica’s story and Charley Baker’s dishonesty problem reach as many voters as possible.
As Ryan says, signatures don’t automatically appear on “diaries” (posts). They only appear on comments.
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p>You should, however, be able to edit diaries to add your disclosure line. In this case, I think being the first poster is good enough. I only mention this for future reference.
What don’t the Bakers of the world understand? If 70% of the economy is driven by consumer spending, and you cut the consumer’s income off at the knees, then you kill the economy too.
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p>CEOs like Baker earning $1,000,000+ cannot make up the slack from 30,000,000 lost jobs. Is Baker going to buy a million shoes? A million cars?
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p>Wealth that is distributed MAKES wealth because people can buy, and so wealth that is spread out makes jobs.
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p>If one Wall Street Baron gets a $40,000,000 bonus or if 40,000 people each get $1000 bonuses, which do you think better fuels consumer spending? Is that Wall Street Greedbag Baron going to eat 40,000 burgers, or buy 40,000 towels? Etc.
I think I heard Mr. Baker claim that suffering people who need and deserve state services are having trouble getting them because they can’t get to the right person. I’ll say “Amen” to that — my wife and I have had to jump through amazing hoops to get the information we need about getting unemployment compensation, and we still don’t know the real story about the COBRA subsidies that appear to be available.
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p>But then, he follows with the assertion that reducing the number of staffers will somehow help.
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p>Excuse me?
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p>The phone lines are already jammed. My wife already has to wait until Thursday (based on her social security number) to get to anybody because the demand is so great. By the way, when we finally do get to a human, they have been — without exception — extraordinarily helpful, smart, and most of all empathetic. As nearly as I can tell, the resources of the State are already overworked and nearly overwhelmed.
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p>How on earth are further reductions supposed to help?
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p>You know as well as I do that they won’t. This man is simply lying. The true GOP philosophy is either “I’ve got mine, you lose, so better luck next time” or its darker undertone “it’s dog eat dog and I’ll screw you if I can, what are you going to do about it?”
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p>It’s no wonder that GOP apologists are so quick to whine about “class warfare” — they’ve been practicing it for decades. I’m glad to see folks belatedly calling out their lies for what they are.
Baker’s spin machine is slowly starting to turn.
http://criticalmassachusetts.b…
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p>and
http://www.bostonherald.com/ne…
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p>Baker’s campaign is saying there were 80,837 full-time equivalent state employees when the Patrick-Murray Administration took office in 2007, and now there are 84,688 – because of the failure to enact a “hiring and salary freeze.”
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p>Baker is again being dishonest by including employees outside the executive branch that the Administration has no control over. About half of the 80,000-plus employees Baker’s campaign is referencing are not under Executive Branch control.
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p>As a former A&F Secretary Baker should know this.
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p>The Patrick-Murray administration has reduced the number of positions in the Executive Branch by 2,835 since taking office.
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p>In case you were wondering…
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p>On Jan. 1, 2007 there were 38,742 Executive Branch budgeted jobs, and on Feb. 27, 2010, during the last count, there were 35,907 — a reduction of 2,835 positions.
Which is why I get so ballistic over the structure of the new MassDOT!!!! Take existing agencies OUT of the Executive branch, and place them IN a NEW authority!
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p>”I am shocked – SHOCKED – to find gambling going on here!..Your winnings, Capt. Reynaud..Oh, thank you very much..”
Charlie Baker made the point last week that many in the private sector have taken pay cuts, but it’s the exception to the rule to find someone in the public sector who has taken a pay cut. Nothing in your post says that his statement was untrue.
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p>It’s debatable whether a forced furlough day is actually a pay cut. The furloughed employees are being paid the same amount for each day they work, but they’re being asked not to work or get paid a few days. Surely the days off have some value to the employee. I usually think of a pay cut as getting less money for doing the same amount of work, but an employee that is furloughed is doing less work.
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p>But putting that issue aside, my understanding has always been that the furloughs were restricted to certain highly paid managers. LG Murray seems to confirm that when he claims that himself and thousands of other managers have taken furloughs. The Boston Herald lists over 96,000 state employees. I think there was a recent debate somewhere on this site about how many employees there are, depending on whether quasi-executive agencies are included. But even assuming only 35,000 state employees, if only a few thousand highly paid managers have been furloughed, then that makes it the exception to the rule, just as Charlie Baker claimed.
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p>And now you point to concessions, which I believe were first announced in a March 9 press release, to prove that Charlie Baker’s statement from a week prior to March 9 was untruthful.
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p>So it’s not clear that unpaid furloughs are a pay cut, and unpaid furloughs have been the exception to the rule until yesterday, but somehow Charlie Baker’s statement from last week was incorrect? But instead of further explanation, LG Murray launches into an attack on Charlie Baker for being a highly paid CEO in 2008 and part of 2009.
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p>You know, I haven’t heard of many people whose bosses have told them “I’m sorry, instead of a raise this year, I’m actually going to pay you less than last year”.
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p>Sure, people are making less money, but not because their pay rates are being lowered. People on commissions are making less money because they’re selling less. Hourly workers are making less because they’re getting less hours. People aren’t getting the bonuses they did when the economy was good. Small businesses are making less money because they are less busy. And people are certainly getting laid off and are being forced to take lesser jobs at lesser pay.
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p>But pay cuts? Who is getting actual salaried pay cuts in the private sector?
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p>Your argument about furloughs is kind-of like arguing that the convenience store sole proprietor shouldn’t be complaining that he’s taken a pay cut (due to lower sales) because he doesn’t have to work as hard, so he should instead be celebrating his lighter workload. See if that flies.
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p>But again, I really haven’t heard of people’s salaries being reduced. Am I just missing all that?
You’re dead wrong when you say a furlough is not a pay cut.
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p>The state’s roughly 5,000 managers have been asked to take furloughs for the last two fiscal years as well as contribute larger percentages of their wages to their health care costs.
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p>That means the state is paying them less money each year and no matter how you spin it, that’s a pay cut.
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p>Furthermore many employees in the Governor’s administration and elsewhere worked on furlough days even though they weren’t getting paid for those days.
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p>Therefore Charlie Baker statement was untrue.
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p>Regarding the concessions, it’s true that a new round of concessions were announced March 9 after Baker made his statement, but long before that, the Patrick-Murray Administration had successfully negotiated wage and benefit reductions for fiscal year 2010 and beyond with state bargaining units representing another 35,000 state employees.
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p>Examples of the concessions include wage furloughs; contributions to the state from bargaining units’ health and welfare funds; and delays in wage increases previously negotiated.
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p>These concessions are the first of their kind to be secured by a Governor and will save taxpayers millions of dollars.
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p>Again Charlie Baker’s claims about no state employees taking cuts are false.
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p>By the way, the full story from State House News is up here:
http://www.dailynewstranscript…
First of all, is there an official definition of a pay cut that you’re using? I said that I usually think of a pay cut as less pay for the same work. In this case, the workers are getting less pay for less work. But if you’re using a definition that only looks at the total amount paid to the employee, then yes a furlough is a pay cut. It’s a technical debate, but I don’t think using my definition is “dead wrong” as you claim.
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p>But more importantly, when did Charlie Baker ever make the claim that you attribute to him that no state employees took pay cuts? In the recording you link to, he actually says that Erica is the exception to the rule. And since you claim that only 5,000 state employees actually faced these furloughs in years before 2010, then Charlie Baker is right. 5,000 out of 35,000 – 85,000 (depending on which number you use for total state employees – does the 5,000 include managers in quasi-executive agencies?) means that only 6% – 14% of state employees took “pay cuts.” So Charlie Baker is right – it’s the exception to the rule.
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p>Can you point to where Charlie Baker makes the claim that no state employees took pay cuts? Or is it you (and, by implication, your boss LG Murray) that is playing fast and loose with the truth?
When Charlie Baker said that “Erica” was “the exception to the rule”, he did so with the clear and obvious implication that no state workers have sacrificed.
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p>Here’s a transcript of the fragment in question (2:29-3:36):
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p>He explicitly identifies employees of “cities and towns” who took “5, 7 and 8 percent reductions.” He cites “private sector” workers who lost “ten, fifteen, twenty percent.”
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p>Here’s the key question (emphasis mine):
Do you know anybody in the state government who actually was negotiated through a reduction of anything like that?
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p>”Anybody”. As in “nobody in state government took a comparable reduction.”
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p>When Erica outlined her sacrifice, the “rule” that Erica was the “exception” to was clearly his (false) claim that state workers have not sacrificed.
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p>He digs himself in deeper in his final phrase: “based on my understanding of what took place.”
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p>Charlie Baker’s statements in this entire exchange is the evidence that “Charlie Baker makes the claim that no state employees took pay cuts.” That’s clearly the claim he made.
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p>Parenthetically, this looks like a good example of the old dictum that a good lawyer never asks a question that he doesn’t know the answer to. It’s hilarious that this entire damning exchange is in response to a line of questioning that Charlie Baker initiated himself. Bad mistake — and revealing at that, because it demonstrates that Mr. Baker either truly is ignorant of the sacrifices that State workers have already made, or he knows and is eager to lie about it.
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p>The exchange demonstrates Mr. Baker’s unsuitability for the office he seeks.
My first question is: Do managers negotiate their furloughs or does the Gov. have power to impose them on managers? Charlie Baker clearly restricts his question to negotiated pay reductions. If managers don’t negotiate their reductions, and if only managers were subject to pay reductions before yesterday, then the answer to the question would have to be no, and Erica did not answer the question correctly.
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p>And LG Murray uses the 80,000 number in that SHNS, so I’ll assume that the 5,000 managers who were furloughed is out of 80,000 total state employees. That means that only 6% of state employees actually experienced “pay cuts” (setting aside my semantic argument above of whether a furlough is even a pay cut). Charlie Baker was making the point that the private sector (and muni employees too for that matter) have sacrificed considerably in these tough times. But only 6% of state employees have sacrificed anything at all, and out of those who have sacrificed, its still not clear thst their sacrifice is comparable to that of muni and private sector employees. He just got unlucky that Erica happened to be one of the 6% (and perhaps that Erics misunderstood the question and have an untruthful answer), so he was unable to make his point with the flourish that he would have had if Erica were in the bottom 94% of state employees.
A candidate for governor was a guest on a radio talk show.
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p>He attempted to pander to those in the radio audience who think state workers are selfish, overpaid, and incompetent — you know, the usual flagrantly dishonest GOP/rightwing/populist party line (their own appointees and patronage hires, of course, are always hardworking dedicated public servants).
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p>The word “furlow” was mentioned exactly once, off-handedly, by “Erica”. This “5,000 manager” number is your own; it was not part of the interview. Your efforts to quote numbers and argue about furlows are nothing but a smoke screen that serves to obfuscate the obvious truth: your guy screwed up.
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p>I know it’s a difficult pill to swallow. Nevertheless, we can all hear it with our own ears and read it in the transcript.
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p>Charlie Baker blew it. He initiated an exchange that he thought was going to persuade the listening audience that he’s the right man candidate for the job. Instead, he accomplished just the opposite.
Charlie Baker tried to make a point that state government workers under Gov. Patrick did not make comparable sacrifices to both muni workers and private sector workers during this current recession. The numbers and the statements from LG Murray indicate that Charlie Baker’s point is correct. Yet somehow the facts are some kind of “smoke screen” that is used to hide the “screw up” by Charlie Baker when he took a chance with a line of questioning that had a 94% chance of successfully proving his point. Interesting, perhaps your mind is too boggled to think logically here.
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p>All that being said, I would like to acknowledge the success that Gov. Patrick has accomplished by negotiating future furloughs and wage freezes with the government employee unions. It’s an important measure of cost containment, and I join David and others in applauding Gov. Patrick. Private sector employees and many other states have already accomplished this, but MA has survived so far, and it’s better late then never.
Baker used irrelevant numbers when he claimed that he knew private-sector “people who lost 10- 15- 20-percent of what they were getting paid.” The only such numbers I can imagine would be workers paid on commission or those who were laid off and took lower-paying jobs. Neither condition applies to either state or municipal workers. Are there salaried or hourly workers in the private sector whose wages have been cut 10-to-20%? I don’t know of any.
I’d be curious to know what city and town workers that negotiated a 5-8% reduction in pay in their collective bargaining sessions. Can someone give examples of this?
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p>He may be including health care costs in his “reduction in what they got paid” statement — which would be ironic, coming from a former health care executive.
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p>That sounds like a chance for the Patrick campaign to pounce — challenge the statement and ask which towns are paying less to their employees, and when he names them, point out that it is due to the actions of the sector that he managed.
Charlie Baker was just throwing out examples, and his examples of pay cuts have neither been proven nor disproven as the general rule for private and muni employees. Anecdotally, I can say that I know people in the private sectors whose companies have imposed across the board pay cuts, pay freezes, subatantial mandatory furloughs, and taken other actions that may or may not constitute a “pay cut” (still waiting for akloftus to define what a pay cut is).
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p>But looking at the numbers, there was $720,592,797 in withholding tax remitted in August 2009 and there was $750,677,341 in withholding tax remitted in August, 2008. (I did not intentionally cherry pick this month. It’s really only helpful to compare withholding data against the same month from prior year. I was trying to pick a month that reflects the amount towards the beginning of the recession with the amount from the middle of the recession). That’s a 9.6% dip in withholding remittance. But, of course, there needs to be corrections for people who lost their jobs entirely, and for the 94% of the 80,000 state workers who did not experience any “pay cuts” and, presumably, did not have their withholding decreased.
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p>So I don’t know if Charlie Baker’s examples are the rule, or the exception to the rule. But they haven’t yet been disproven, and they seem at least plausible based on the 9.6% decrease in withholding remittance.
I can agree that people are making less money overall, but I don’t agree with an assumption that a significant reason for the tax withholding decrease is due to people receiving salary reductions.
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p>I have never heard an instance of someone telling their employees, “I’m sorry, but I will be cutting your pay this year”, and I’ve worked for several companies that went through serious financial trouble, including bankruptcy.
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p>Usually employers lay off people and then ask the others to work harder. Or they cut back hours for hourly employees. Or, as I pointed out, people make money due to lower commissions or bonuses Cutting salary or pay rate is a horrible and offensive strategy, because that is a clear signal for workers to just quietly produce less, and it makes them care less about their jobs.
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p>I just don’t think that the premise of:
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p>
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p>Should go unchallenged, because it’s one of those things which is maybe plausible on its face, until you think a little harder about it and realize that it is extremely impractical and unlikely for an employer to cut the pay rate of an employee.
It is hard to believe Baker was making $6,000 a day and somehow thinks he can reach out to the working class.
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p>I could respect someone for wanting to sit down and find overlaps in services in State Government (I am sure they exist) but Baker’s hyperbole is really pushing it.