PEF President Testifies on State Workforce Issues

ALBANY, NY (03/02/2011)(readMedia)-- The president of the New York State Public Employees Federation (PEF) testified at a hearing on workforce issues in Albany today. PEF President Kenneth Brynien told legislators that for the sake of fairness, the Executive Budget should not require New York public employees to pay the entire price for the state's deficit.

"Public servants didn't cause this deficit, and it begs the question why state workers, school employees, and health care workers should be asked to bear the brunt of the sacrifice to address this fiscal crisis," he said.

Brynien pointed out that over the past three decades the state workforce has dropped 24 percent, not counting the public university staff, between the high of more than 210,000 in the late 1980s and the nearly 160,000 today.

"Now, this budget again targets state workers. The Executive Budget wants state employees to make more than $1 billion in concessions and cuts in SFY 2011-12 or face the possibility of 9,800 layoffs on top of the 35,000 positions already lost since 1990," Brynien said.

"This is not a bloated workforce. The number of state employees per capita in New York is 31 percent below the national average; less than all our neighboring states and less than most states in the South and West," he added.

Brynien suggested a broader-based approach to address the deficit.

PEF's ideas included:

-Rolling corporate tax breaks back to their 2000 level to save $1.3 billion.

-Extending the temporary increase in tax rates for high income earners to save $1 billion this year and $5 billion next.

-Reducing public authority expenditures by 10 percent, similar to what has been proposed for state agencies, to save $4.4 billion annually.

-Reducing the number of costly private consultants and replacing them with state employees could save another quarter-of-a-billion dollars – about $280 million – a year.

"We don't think that fairness and balance are too much to ask. Doing some of these things would make this a fairer, a more open and democratic, as well as a more efficient budget. In short, it would make it a better budget for all New Yorkers," Brynien said.

PEF is the state's second-largest state-employee union, representing 56,000 professional, scientific and technical employees.