In his latest act of madness, Arnold is now proposing a five percent cut across the board for all state employees:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to propose a 5 percent across-the-board pay cut for state workers to save nearly $500 million in next year’s budget, a spokesman said Thursday.(SacBee 5/28/09)

The thing is that these “across the board” cuts are simply lazy. Resources aren’t as important in one place as they are another. That’s why we don’t simply grow or scale back the budget by a percentage each year. There are some programs that are more important than others.

At this point, it is imperative that progressives work to provide some visiblity for these crazy cuts.  One such group who is doing that is SEIU, whose workers just wrapped up their 48-hour Sacramento vigil to avoid the drastic cuts in in-home support services (IHSS).  Yesterday, I spoke to Eliseo Medina, about the situation here in California.  



While it wasn’t surprising to hear that this situation was really only different from other situations in other states by the willingness to work together by the governor, the bigger issue that grabbed my attention was the way the issue was sort of blown off.  Before the May election, SEIU leaders had a sit-down with the Governor, and reached out to work together for solutions to the budget situation.  But once the election passed, there was silence on the other end of the line. No word from the Governor or his nominally Democratic CoS Susan Kennedy. It was straight to the “cut to the bone rhetoric.”

The thing about IHSS is that there really isn’t a cost-efficient way to cut.  Here are the alternatives:

1) Cut wages from $12 to minimum wage, $8. You lose a slew of IHSS workers to other service sector jobs, even in this economy.  These people are generally reliable people, and that’s always in demand. And when you get more money working at In ‘N’ Out, why do we expect the dedicated IHSS workers to stick around?

2) Cut service levels. Even at higher wages, IHSS care is far cheaper than nursing home care. Up to 4 times cheaper. So when the governor threatens to cut both per client services and service availability, what he is really saying is that these people should simply go to nursing homes.

Funny thing about this is that when they get on MediCal, because they will, the state simply ends up paying on the other end. Guess what, there are laws about what you can do to people.  Under both California and federal laws, we have commitments to provide care. SEIU has already filed one lawsuit, and plans to bring another.  When you are cutting into the bone, it’s simply not as easy as Arnold would like to portray.

On the other hand, nothing is really easy these days.  SEIU is also facing a fight with the former leaders of UHW who have created their own union, NUHW. NUHW recently won a local election in San Pablo and there’s another election in Fresno.