Mark Dearmon: Parsing state worker pay

In response to Neal Alexander’s June 9 letter to the editor “State employees seeing pay increases”: It’s unfortunate that Alexander says SEANC’s Director of Government Relations Ardis Watkins and columnist Ned Barnett “need to be better informed.” In reality, Alexander is the one who seems to be uninformed.

While Alexander accurately states that he met with SEANC’s leadership recently and discussed initiatives with regard to state employee pay, he’s telling only part of the story. SEANC’s executive director recently discussed that meeting with SEANC leaders and told us that Alexander’s presentation was probably one of the best he had ever seen from the Office of State Human Resources. But the fact remains that the last six years have been the worst for state employee pay in more than 30 years.

Sadly, Alexander’s initiatives focus on less than a third of the 75,000 nonteacher state employees under his direction. He fails to recognize that over the past six years, the average state employee salary has lost 9 percent in buying power based on the increase in the cost of living.

I’m a fan of market-based pay as a component of any pay plan, but market-based pay should also account for increases in the cost of living. Using Alexander’s logic, more than 50,000 state employees have been immune from the effects of inflation, which we know is far from the truth.

Alexander says that Barnett and Watkins may be confused because “we are taking a more modern approach to state employee pay.” Does this modern approach ignore more than 50,000 state employees?

The real problem with Alexander’s plan is that there is no guaranteed funding. The General Assembly would have to fund these market increases every year, and we found this to be a problem with the previous pay plan. Somehow there’s never quite enough money to cover state employee salaries no matter what system is used.

In the recent Senate debate over the budget, retired state employees were referred to as a liability because of our retirement system. As a recently retired state employee with almost 40 years of service, I’m saddened to know that our elected leaders think of me as a liability. They seem to forget that I put 6 percent of my salary into the retirement system every month. How does that make me a liability?

The length limit was waived to permit a fuller response to the letter.

This story was originally published June 21, 2016 at 4:24 PM with the headline "Mark Dearmon: Parsing state worker pay."