Teaneck Blog

Casting a wary eye on Teaneck politics and municipal affairs

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Hue and cry raises questions

We are still two weeks away from the Council's reorganization meeting, but a number of citizens are already protesting the presumed outcome. A series of speakers during last night's Good & Welfare lobbied for the selection of Lizette Parker as Teaneck's next mayor. Of course, under Teaneck's council-manager system of government, the mayor is selected by the majority vote of the new Council, not by popular vote. What's behind the heightened public interest in a process that has historically been conducted behind closed doors? Why are so many citizens, including a former mayor, attempting to insert themselves into the process this year?

It does not take more than a quick glance at the makeup of the incoming Council to see that the current Deputy Mayor is does not have the votes, so Parker's supporters are right to be concerned. But why do they care so strongly who the Council selects as its leader? The role of mayor is largely ceremonial. It is true that the mayor has some influence over the Council agenda as it impacts policy, but that is exactly why it makes sense for the Council to select the leader who best represents the Council rather than the individual who best represents the town as a whole.

Tuesday's proceedings could have been an orchestrated effort by friends of Parker to try to bolster her candidacy for a position she clearly wants. Or they could have represented a concerted effort by opponents of the Council members who are likely to form the majority for the next two years to put those members on the defensive even before the new term commences. Or they could have just been an expression of boredom now that election season has ended and the school budget is set. Regardless of what motivated the outcry, it ought to be ignored.

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Calling Mark Twain

What are Governor Christie and all those taxpayers whining about? As long as you carefully select the right data points, it can be proven that teacher compensation in the State of New Jersey is actually lagging the growth in private sector pay! A report by Laura Bruno in The Daily Record points out that since 1985, the average worker in New Jersey has enjoyed a greater increase in pay than the average New Jersey teacher.

The NJEA is more than happy to cite this as evidence that efforts to curb the growth of personnel costs in the educational system are misguided.

"Teacher pay and compensation has not gotten out of control like the governor and others insist," said Steve Baker, spokesman for the teacher's union.

If only it were so simple. One counterargument is advanced by Gov. Christie's spokesman Michael Drewniak, who points out that these numbers exclude the additional benefits (healthcare, pension, etc.) earned by teachers, the inclusion of which would drastically alter the picture. 

But even if one focuses solely on the salary figures cited, the argument is a feeble one. Suppose if instead of going back twenty five years, we look back only five (perfectly reasonable given that a large proportion of property tax payers were not even in the labor force back in 1985). Suddenly, the picture is very different. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Cost Index shows that the annual rate of growth in private sector compensation slowed from 2.9% in mid-2005 to 1.6% for the first quarter of 2010. Teacher pay in New Jersey climbed 4.5% from 2009 to 2010 according to the report (and made similar gains in each of the past several years). Neither statistics nor experience support the claim that teacher compensation has not become a heavier burden for the taxpayers to bear.


Of course, the rate of historical increase is not really at issue here. It is the current and future rates of wage and inflation that pose a risk to the state and local fiscal situation and pressure on the homeowner tax burden, and it is those that Gov. Christie is seeking to address.

The NJEA's Baker has a statistic for that too. He claims that a proposed 2.5% cap on teacher pay hikes would "only put teachers out of synch with the private sector, which averaged 3.75 percent annual pay growth the past 10 years." 

Once again, the opponents of fiscal restraint are guilty of extrapolating from the now irrelevant experiences of the distant past. The last time private sector wage growth approached those rates was at the end of 2004 and currently, it is far below even the proposed 2.5% cap for teachers. With high unemployment and widespread economic uncertainty, it is unlikely that private sector wages will resume growing at a rapid pace anytime soon. In the meantime, funding problems on the state and local level continue to mount. 
 

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Sign of the times

Taxpayers, council members, and now apparently even members of the Teaneck BoE are expecting, or at least hoping, for some sort of giveback from teachers' unions in the reshaped budget. In the course of explaining to The Record why he is declining to publicly call for concessions, school board president Ardie Walser hints that such a development would not be unwelcome.
"I don't think that we can put any more pressure on the teachers union than has already been put on by the public," said Ardie Walser, the school board president. "It's a union decision, and a personal decision by members of that union as to what they feel they can do to help us with this issue. I'm not interested in vilifying them, because the ones that are left will have to work harder than they ever have before."
A pay freeze or additional teacher contributions toward benefits costs would certainly make the task of the BoE easier as it prepares to take some hard decisions. Might they also make sense from the perspective of the teachers? Walser seems to suggest as much, reasoning that by relieving some of the pressure on the school budget teachers would be doing themselves a favor by preserving their colleagues' jobs, thereby lightening their workload.

Though united through collective bargaining, it appears that teachers are now placed in a position where individual self-interest will carry the day. A teacher who is likely to keep his or her job and is closer to retirement and therefore less worried about what any future contract might look like is likely to take a stand for the sanctity of contracts. Others might be more willing to support concessions, distasteful as that may be.

Realistically, it appears that the battle that the teachers' unions lost in the court of public opinion is going to cost them the war too, and not just in Teaneck. Across the bridge in New York City, Mayor Bloomberg is moving to cancel scheduled pay hikes for teachers in an effort to preserve teaching positions. Politicians and voters alike have come to understand that as spiraling personnel costs have come to account for larger and larger percentages of public spending and private employees' wage growth has failed to keep pace with that of public employees, future teacher contracts cannot be as generous and that even existing arrangements deserve reconsideration. The times demand it.