A lot has been made of the fact that city employees get to retire on 90% of their pay, with donations of only 4% (now 5%) of their pay. What the press never got around to reporting last year during the pension mess, was that employee pay stinks. It stinks like the stuff the Solid Waste department or Republic Waste and Overbilling Services hauls off. Well ok, maybe not like the taxpayer money the latter hauled off recently, but then it sort of had its own stink.

In a recent article about the Controller’s audit into Republic, I mentioned in passing that we had problems hiring qualified applicants at $18k per year to haul garbage off. This probably has a lot to do with why we privatized. Wait, let’s rephrase that. It probably has a lot to do with the justification used to push the privatization. I have a hard time believing that a private company could get more and better people to do the same crappy work without paying them a whole lot more. (Which makes one wonder if what Republic was really doing was overbilling the city to pay for the higher wages it had to pay. No way to know, and I can’t even confirm what it pays employees — oddly, their website lacks a “Careers with Republic” link. . . (Heh.)

But I can show what the city pays. For a Solid Waste Driver “Salary Range – Pay Grade 6 $617 – $810 Biweekly $16,042-21,060 Annually” But hey, who cares, it’s garbage! Nobody’s going to pay a lot to have it hauled off. But don’t you just love the part where it says “WORKING CONDITIONS: There are occasional exposures to extreme levels of temperature, air pollution, noise, chemical gasses and substances and/or contagious diseases or physical trauma conditions of a short-term nature, such as broken bones or temporary loss of sight or hearing.”

Truly, a dream job. Every kid in the ghetto grows up telling their crack-ho mama, “I’m gonna make myself better, Ma! I’m gonna make it big, just you watch! I’m gonna drive a garbage truck and come home blind, deaf, sick, and unable to walk on my broken legs!” Yessir, for $16-$21k per year, CDL class A or B licence not optional. And believe me, the salary offered an applicant will be on the low end of that scale. So what do others make? Here’s a brief list, all taken from the Dec 14-20 list of job postings:

• Driving a herbicide spray truck: $21,424 to $28,730.
• Parking enforcement at G.R. Brown CC: $21,424 to 36,062 (oddly, its the same pay grade)
• Semi-skilled laborer: $18,564 – $21,060
• Translator (airport) $22,906 -$26182
• Inventory Management Clerk (HPD): $18,018 – $23,894 For that pay, I would probably lose hundreds of boxes of evidence, too.
• Safety Officer: $31,486 – $43,160 The high end of that scale is about $13,000 low compared to the market average, from what I found using Google.
• Senior Clerk, Municpal Court: $17,316 – $28,548

Imagine that not only are you expected to enter a job at that pay level — you are expected to stay very close to that pay level for as long as you do that job. No matter how long you do that job, no matter how good you get at it, or how knowledgeable, you will ALWAYS be paid exactly what the FNG* gets. Because pay increases raise the scale, not the individual.

How motivated would you be?

And there’s a hiring freeze on right now too, because the pension mess really isn’t resolved. You see, the fundamental issue is that prior councils and mayors have been robbing the future to steal from the present. Yes, that sounds weird, but it’s essentially true. To pay for their bloated pet projects and keep the fire & police departments happy, every administration since Whitmire has skimped on employee raises. To make up for the already-crappy-and-fast-getting-worse pay, they kept tacking on extra benefits, especially retirement. Higher percentages, the DROP plan, faster accrual for Directors….All these retirement alterations had to pass the Legislature in Austin, and you never heard any squalling about how the folks in Austin were selling out the city did you? Because there wasn’t any. These deals were done with the full connivence of the Mayor and Council. Why not? By the time the bills became due on the pension, they’d all be long gone, what with six year terms! So if every dollar you pay an employee will mean more dollars of pension funding in the future, how do you control costs?

Simple. You don’t hire anyone in the present, and you don’t give them raises. Because then their pensions become based on the new pay scale.

If you go to the HMEPS website and use their Benefit Calculator, there’s a little note that appears in the fine print. “Benefits assume a 1% per year pay increase.” What’s sad is we don’t even make that level. And it is still below even the low rates of inflation we’ve had for several years. The local metro area inflation for CY 2004 was 3.5%. (The 2005 figures will be out around March.) So every year, employees get squeezed tighter and tighter on salaries that are effectively shrinking, and having to work harder and harder to stay even. Topping it off, the city has quietly emplaced a hiring freeze: people can be replaced, but no “promotion raises” or extra manpower will be authorized.

Losing the promotion raises hurts. Other than the police and fire departments, no one in the City gets periodic automatic raises or performance bonuses. Well, the Council and Mayor can, since they tied their compensation to state judges; they don’t even have to vote on their raises now. What is a promotion raise? It is the practice of rewarding good employees and trumping the lack of council-approved pay adjustments by reclassifying the employee’s job into a higher pay grade. Duties do not really change much, if at all; its strictly a reward for past work, not a change to a new job. I got one last year for a whopping 2.5%.

So it’s no surprise that employees are demoralized, less likely to care about their jobs, and have no motivation to perform better. In my division, the manpower issue is reaching a tipping point where service levels have dropped dramatically just within the last year. There’s too few people to do the job right, which spawns problems that have to be dealt with by others, and there’s too few people to handle that, which spawns worse problems for yet more people, some in other divisions, and they’re shorthanded so some of their problems feed back into our original issue. . . . It is a train wreck in slow motion, and because it’s in slow motion, the public doesn’t notice. Eventually what will happen is that an event will come along and suddenly stress the system past the breaking point. This stress will occur at a semi-predictable time, and the system won’t be resilient enough to handle it. That the event would occur, and would be likely to occur then, will be obvious in hindsight; the recriminations and public furor will begin, and the bulk of it will land on the employees’ heads, because they are first line in dealing with the public.

That bunch of short-timers down at City Hall will largely be clueless, and wonder why and how the employees can be so surly with the public — the inevitable response will be to crack the whip that much harder — and/or send everyone for sensitivity training. Whoopee. More retirements, more knowledge and experience subtracted from the system; newbies have to replace them and learn their jobs on the run.

It’s a structural problem with no good solution. The city needs an answer to overly generous pensions, but the employees won’t stand for having them meddled with further; I think the final figure was something close to 25% of the workforce retired the last time White tried to fix the issue. Which the solution was akin to a bandaid, but at least the final crisis is postphoned.

Unfortunately, not only is it still there, waiting to bushwhack us, but forces are now assembling to make them far worse, in pursuit of their own shortsighted goals… a story for another time.

* (That’s F’ing New Guy, if you didn’t know.)