No Raises for State Employees

The salary compensation plan was announced today and as expected it contained no raises for state employees. What really struck me in reading both the reports of the announcement and other reader comments was this disconnect between reality and perception. The reality is that state employees haven't had a raise in 2 years already. In fact they had their take home pay reduced by 3 percent in each of the previous 2 years due to furloughs, something that Gov. Walker has said did not save the state money. This is probably where he gets his math on the benefit payment plan of only being a reduction of 8 percent when the reality is that it is closer to 12%. But yet there is this perception that the state workers have not felt the pain as everyone else has. Maybe it was that the media didn't play up the furloughs and the 0% raise or talk about the previous 2 years with a 1 and 2% raise (that is 4 years ago, what were private sector employees getting then?). Most state employees understand that they are not going to get rich, they hope to make ends meet and have decent benefits. That is changing with the changes to health care. The state plan is probably really no better than what a large company provides (although everyone is cutting health care benefits, and they say that we don't need a national plan).