Not of this world

Orange County Register 3/25/07

Today we may learn whether California State University teachers will strike in a dispute over pay. We hope a strike can be avoided. It's difficult to see how anyone benefits from teachers walking off the job to pry loose more money from a state agency when California faces a budgetary deficit of a billion dollars, or more.

Professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches in the CSU system have worked two years without a contract, prompting their union membership last week to authorize a strike by an incredible 94 percent vote. It's worth noting, however, that union membership is about 11,000, and of them 81 percent voted. There are 23,300 people employed in those jobs at CSU. The union doesn't necessarily speak for everyone.

The dispute essentially boils down to guarantees. CSU has offered a 24.87 percent raise on average to cover this year and the next three years. The union apparently would accept a 25 percent raise if assured of receiving it, but claims some of the money offered is contingent on extra funding by the Legislature.

Welcome to the real world. In the private sector many people aren't guaranteed their pay will rise at all, let alone 25 percent over any period of time. In fact, when a private company runs a billion dollars in the red, its employees could well expect a pink slip, not a pay raise.

The union argues that faculty salaries lag behind similar industries by about 18 percent. The administration counters that when considering all benefits, CSU faculty are about 5 percent above the "median" of comparison institutions.

If a private employee were paid less by Company A than employees at Company B, he might quit and go to work for the higher-paying employer. That's how markets function. If the higher-paying employer has no openings, the employee may rightly conclude he is being paid what the market says he's worth. This fundamental economic principle seems lost on the union, the California Faculty Association, which appears to believe its members deserve the same pay as others are paid elsewhere even though CSU is affected by the state's billion-dollar deficit.

These are hard realities in the private sector. That doesn't appear to be the case in the artificial economy of state government where job security is assured by tenure, where striking teachers can't be fired and where there exist expectations of guaranteed pay raises even when the employer runs massive deficits.