By Michael Morisy
June 22nd, 2011
Even after dozens of rounds of layoffs and promises of cutbacks state employment continued to be a growth industry in Massachusetts through the recession, according to analysis of data from the Comptroller of the Commonwealth and from the Human Resources Division. Several state departments, after a dozen or more layoffs, actually ended up with an increased headcount…
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“Saving money” by hiring hundreds of staff attorneys, support staff, and rending new offices. At the same time, the number of State Police officers is down 1000. Is it just me, or does this make no sense, at all?
and Charlie Baker / Pioneer was full of crap?
A tip toe in the cow patties with Pioneer one again I see.
n/t
The premise of this piece appears to be that something is radically amiss if a decline in the number of private sector employees is not matched by a decline in the number of public sector employees (“how and why did the number of public employees rise, even as the private sector lost over 140,000 jobs since 2001”).
But let’s think a moment before we summon Dr. Hayek for emergency surgery. Surely one of the functions of government is to mitigate harms caused when the private sector misfires, as it has during this Great Recession. So when private sector unemployment contributes to the doubling of people eligible for food stamps over the past four years, isn’t the state’s obligation to ensure the prompt and efficient distribution of that assistance, including by hiring more workers if necessary?
For instance, I don’t think people should be too upset if it turns out that the State is employing more workers for a lower average compensation. And it also seems perfectly reasonable for the State to take advantage of its share of Federal stimulus money.
Furthermore those numbers are FTEs, not full time employees. Part time workers tend to get paid at a lower rate and often don’t get benefits. So an increase in FTEs does not necessarily indicate that cost cutting is not going on.
One big difference between Government and private business, is that when times are bad a private company often has less actual work to do and needs fewer workers; that is simply not true for many Government agencies.
In any case, a lot more digging is necessary to really make sense of these numbers.
The last thing I want to do is imply that the Pioneer Institute is obfuscating or, God forbid, lying. And thus it is with more than a modicum of humility, fear, and trepidation that I ask,IS THERE ANY TRUTH IN THIS POST AT ALL?!
I’m used to the barely intelligible dreck Pioneer Micaela posts on occasion. And I followed the diary link to the Pioneer site where I was directed to the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report as an alleged source for the 4.96% increase in state employees. I searched the document and, lo and behold, I couldn’t find the number. And the only inclusion of the letters “FTE” appeared in the word “after.” And the only reference to employees refers to retirement.
There may have been an increase in state employees, but looking for a clear (dare I say, honest?) accounting from the Pioneer Institute or its minions is harder than finding Whitey Bulger.
The Pioneer Institute lacks any kind of credibility to comment about… well, anything… without people like me wanting to go look in at all their data to see how they’re contorting it or blowing it out of proportion. And, yet, I don’t feel like wasting hours of my life. So, I’ll just leave it at this: Boooo.
Why don’t you spend some more of your time going after big corporate donors and the support of the wealthy elite so your “think tank” can do even more incredible damage to this fair Commonwealth of ours?
I think you can download it by clicking on the graph. Lazy.
But worse is your ad hominem attack on the Pioneer Institute. You don’t like the study’s conclusion so slam the messenger.
The takeaway is that despite the Gov’s political rhetoric, the results went in the opposite direction. The economic affect of 7 additional people here and 20 there is de minimis, but it’s the principal of the thing. It’s like Patrick couldn’t give a sh*t about the increase. Was his prior concern simply to humor the voter/taxpayer?
I just simply don’t believe the Pioneer Institute about, well, anything. They could tell me the sky is blue and I’d want to go outside and check for myself. So, without knowing what the real “results” are, I can’t like or dislike them, and I’m not going to spend hours or days pouring over whatever material they’ve provided, then have to find other data that would either confirm or refute it.
It’s not worth my time, particularly when we can just look at the total size of the budget to see whether the government has made cuts or not in the past few years. The answer is clear: the cuts have been both massive and devastating, and you can see the results from it pretty much everywhere you go, whether it’s a road that wasn’t paved, a train that wasn’t on time or a school that got shut down.
And a lot of that happens as a result of all the work Pioneer does to kill government, and destroy the middle class, on a daily basis.