Reducing California state payroll a daunting task - Los Angeles Times

Showing the same acument that has made the Detroit automakers and public schools such undisputed masters in their fields, state employees show their willingness to completely capsize the ship of state for the sake of maintaining their ever-increasing pay and numbers, without any regard to justification, performance, or priorities.

And needless to say, Democratic politicians prove themselves willing to govern exclusively for the benefit of their main constituency -- unionized state workers -- as opposed to that of the state as a whole.

Reducing California state payroll a daunting task - Los Angeles Times.

Cutting the state workforce "is just very difficult to do," said Jason Dickerson, a public employment expert at the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office. "It can be a very long and cumbersome process."

Personnel records show that there have been no mass layoffs in state government since 1975, when 2,500 California Department of Transportation employees lost their jobs during a budget crunch...

Schwarzenegger has been stymied in previous efforts to reduce the workforce.

His 2004 California Performance Review, a top-to-bottom examination of state government, proposed various ways the state could consolidate operations to function more effectively. The Legislature rejected every one of them. The governor put the proposals on the back burner, and the state payroll continued to grow...

But Frates said there is a reluctance to irritate the powerful unions with talk of job reductions before it is absolutely necessary. By then, it is usually too late to devise a practical plan. "The political will just isn't there," he said.

Unlike normal organizations, which grow in good times and shrink in bad times, and in which good performance is rewarded and bad performance is punished, public employee unions and their Democratic public servants instead grow like a Behemoth or Leviathan, subordinating all public interest to their quest for more pay for mediocre performance.

The next eight years will be a lot of fun...