Study supports SB5...

Senate Bill 5 saves $1.3B, study says

That's the headline of an article that ran in Saturday's Dispatch. The State's been in an uproar for a couple of weeks now. There have been 20+ hours of testimony before the Senate committee, several days of protests at the Statehouse, tons of water cooler talk, coverage in all the papers and on all the networks, and we've even made it onto The Colbert Report, and yet just days before the committee is to vote, there is suddenly talk of a study that supports SB5?

And The Dispatch is the only entity in the whole darn state who knows anything about the report?

C'mon, really? Seriously? Who believes this... crap?

The study supposedly tallies the millions that would have been saved in 2010 without the automatic pay increases that SB5 would eliminate. Um... what automatic pay increases would those be? The ones that the current union contracts did away with?

To read the article, it's as though the salaries and benefits in question are nothing but numbers in the state ledger. Could we please remember that there are people behind those numbers?! When certain folks like to go on about how overpaid state workers are, I never ever see them quote numbers or salaries. The only mention I've seen in the recent coverage was a commenter talking about the salaries of administrators. So all of our bosses. You know, the non-union upper management. Cutting the salaries and benefits of the actual workers doesn't touch those salaries. And overpaid upper management -- as everyone should realize -- does not equal overpaid worker bees.

Though it's "merely" anecdotal, again and again I've watched my professional friends either ignore the public sector altogether or leave the public sector for the private sector. Why, you ask? Because most of the time you make more in the private sector. Period. End of story.

Oy.