The real stakes of getting tough with public workers.

• Author: Donahue, John D.

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Not long ago, Midwestern civil servants would have been low on most Americans' lists of groups prone to raucous public protest. Yet as the winter of 2011 grudgingly yielded to spring in the heartland, throngs of furious public employees took to the streets to resist gubernatorial and legislative bids to ease current deficits, and forestall future ones, by cutting compensation and curbing bargaining rights. The protests that started in Wisconsin were quickly echoed in Ohio and Indiana, with the ripples spreading unpredictably.

Tumbling revenues and soaring demands have brought merciless pressure to bear on state and local budgets, and calls to cut public payrolls are intensifying. In the vast majority of cities and states--not to mention the federal government--something simply has to give, unless the laws of arithmetic are repealed. And politicians find it easier to target public workers' pay and benefits than to raise taxes or trim the core services that voters cherish. Moreover, as the long-term forces of automation and globalization combine with short-term recession to ravage private-sector workforces, taxpayers resent that public servants are sheltered from the economic tempests.

Poll after poll, going back decades, reveals jaundiced popular views of government employees. In one reasonably representative 2011 poll, New Jersey voters heavily favored layoffs, furloughs, and wage freezes for state workers. (1) A February 2011 poll conducted by Gallup for USA Today found nearly two times more support for cutting government workers' pay and benefits than for raising taxes as a response to state budget crises. (2) There are a few very recent indications that hardball tactics against public workers are generating some unaccustomed sympathy, however. A Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner poll of Wisconsin voters found that barely a fifth backed the governor's recent bid to eliminate most collective bargaining rights. (3) And a New York Times/CBS News poll--in direct contrast most such surveys, including the one done weeks earlier for USA Today--found two voters favoring tax increases for every one who preferred to cut public workers' benefits to narrow budget gaps. (4)

DEULING CONCLUSIONS

Despite these few indications that the harshest foes of public workers may have overplayed their hands, it seems all but inevitable that governmental workforces will take a beating in the months and years to come. All but six states have already cut the number, hours, or compensation of public employees. (5) Even as private payrolls start to recover, the public sector's February 2011 workforce had shed 360,000 jobs since two years earlier. (6) Workers themselves see the writing on the wall. In the words of Andrea Douglas, a New Jersey claims representative: "I'm a realist. The private sector is looking at us, and we do look good." (7) It seems virtually certain that governmental employees will lose more ground before this political cycle turns.

But should public workers take the hit? Will reducing public payrolls--shrinking workforces, paring pay, curbing benefits--make government more effective? More efficient? Will it even make taxing and spending fairer? On this question, simple, straightforward answers are far more elusive.

Not that you'd learn that by reading recent commentary on the issue, from a range of ideological vantage points. Chris Edwards, for example, pulls no punches in the Cato Journal. In many pages of scholarly analysis dueled by honest conviction he shows the compensation of state and local workers--wages and salaries, but especially benefits--have soared beyond private-sector benchmarks in recent years. He relates the concurrent rise of public-sector unionism, especially remarkable in light of labor's collapse in the private sector, and quite plausibly traces public employees' workplace advantages to differential rates of organization. Edwards ends with a sweeping declaration that "Americans need higher-quality government services at lower cost to avert a fiscal crisis.... Public sector compensation--and benefit plans in particular--need to be overhauled ..." (8)

Keith A. Bender and John S. Heywood, in a data-drenched study released at a roughly the same time as Edwards' report, reach a conclusion that is similarly clear-cut but pretty much the opposite. They find that state and local workers are seriously underpaid. (9) Line up public...