• Strain at a gnat, swallow a camel • Unions have outlived their worth Strain at a gnat, swallow a camel In response to Sunday’s editorial (“Pay raises deserve public explanation”), I continue to thank The Garden Island for serving
• Strain at a gnat, swallow a camel •
Unions have outlived their worth
Strain at a gnat, swallow a camel
In response to Sunday’s editorial (“Pay raises deserve public explanation”), I continue to thank The Garden Island for serving as a forum for educating the public about the county’s executive salary process.
The voters approved a charter amendment in 2006 that made major changes in the salary process. A few months later the Salary Commission established an across-the-board salary increase of 25 percent followed by three seven percent increases spread over two and a half years. The increases were established in an April 2007 resolution that the administration had a large hand in bringing forward and the council approved even though it could have rejected it in whole or in part, but could not amend it.
Neither the public nor The Garden Island monitored the process leading to the 2007 resolution and it took effect with hardly a murmur and, if memory serves, without a public hearing. If we had been on our toes, we might have questioned the wisdom of the resolution or we might have asked the council to reject the three 7 percent raises, which would not have prevented the commission from bringing them forward on a yearly basis. Taking that route would have been in keeping with the salary process envisioned in the charter amendment.
Two years later the lack of wisdom in establishing multiple raises became apparent when the mayor asked the commission to defer the final 7 percent administrative raises from December 2009 to December 2011 due to the county’s altered fiscal condition.
A more appropriate action would have been to cancel the final 7 percent raises for everyone and bring them back when circumstances warranted.
The commission balked. By that time the members were deeply committed to their chosen mission of eliminating “pay inversion” and enabling the county to attract and retain highly qualified personnel, and they refused to accommodate the mayor’s request.
The administration then saw to it that the boards and commission with power to appoint department heads told the commission that they agreed with the mayor’s request, whereupon the commission relented to the extent of deferring the raises to December 2010.
I do not know about the legality of the commission’s deferring raises, but I am quite sure that canceling rather than deferring is the action consistent with the charter’s intent.
It is within this context that the commission adopted a resolution in August 2009 deferring the final 7 percent raises for administrative personnel but allowing three council-related and all prosecutor-related raises to take effect. The resolution offered no explanation for the disparity in its treatment of the two sets of raises. The council approved the resolution.
I am glad to see that Councilmember Yukimura and The Garden Island have shifted from blaming the county clerk for accepting that final raise to charging but not pinning down the obvious; i.e. that the council was derelict in its handling of performance evaluations and the Salary Commission was derelict in allowing raises for which it had not received the appropriate documentation.
As for holding people accountable, I suggest we start with ourselves for not monitoring this process from beginning to end. By the way, those administrative raises were deferred again, to July 1, 2011, and the mayor and council, with the blessing of the Salary Commission, could try to violate the charter by manipulating salaries through the budget process. So it’s not too late to get involved.
Horace Stoessel, Kapa‘a
Unions have outlived their worth
Maybe when our parents were in the work force did being a union member hold any water. I know my parents were treated with a different sort of respect, because they were a necessary part of the successes of their employer.
Now, this emotional connection with your boss is extinct. You are constantly being looked down upon or played by those who are insecure about their ladder-climbing tactics that have or will back fire.
Even if highly educated with one swipe it can disappear and positioning is forever lost. Employers have gone back to disrespectful demeaning tactics that lacks the integrity necessary to a promising work force.
To be a union member and garner union support to this now retired worker was a huge waste of milk money. In this case over 30 years and three tours of duty as a WH associate, the ILWU sits at the right-hand side of the employer and is similarly so for the lifeguards and their lagging union representation, Hawai‘i Government Employees Association.
Debra Kekaualua, Lihu‘e
