As problems go for Premier Brad Wall's government, consider this one only partially of its own making.
For years, Wall's NDP predecessors _ Roy Romanow and Lorne Calvert _ also battled to keep the wages of strong unions in check. Lest anyone think the NDP premiers were always pandering to their friends in the unions, it's worth noting that it was Romanow who ordered the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Worker (IBEW) back to work in 1998-99 and that it was Calvert who imposed the zero-, one- and one-per-cent wage increases on the entire public sector.
This background is especially significant in the context of today's stories of runaway salary and overtime costs in the public sector.
According to the Crown Corporations 2009 payee list that registers the salaries of every Crown employee making more than $50,000, the average SaskPower wage among its 2,653 employees hit $100,151. Based on a total SaskPower payroll of $265.7 million, there were 1,133 SaskPower that earned more than $100,000. Admittedly, this is a large company with a lot of well-paid engineers and corporate executives (although it should be noted 13 highest-paid executives in SaskPower's corporate executive suite only averaged $240,369 in 2009).
When you get right down to it, high wage costs at SaskPower are directly related to overtime _ 16 per cent of all SaskPower's salary costs in 2009.
Of course, both union and management at SaskPower argue that overtime is necessary for a power company that must send lineman out at all hours to ensure that your lights stay on. There's some validity to this, as is there validity to the argument that overtime can actually be more cost efficient to taxpayers than buying power from other jurisdictions.
But it's also undeniable that, in certain sectors of the public sector, employees view overtime as their right. It becomes a huge issue at contract time, as was the case in the last SUN negotiation when the union sought triple overtime. Negotiations can be structured on achieving the maximum benefit of overtime and ensuring that overtime quickly kicks in.
Government and even the public sometime take for granted that overtime is the only alternative.
Overtime is not always objectively assessed or even properly monitored. One gets the distinct impression that it's occasionally abused _ sometimes to the extreme, as we recently witnessed the case of a Regina jail guard fired for falsely claiming $34,000 worth of overtime he did not work in a two-year period.
This takes us to the recent news that the highest-paid nurse in the Regina Qu'Appelle Health Region earned almost quarter of a million dollars last year and their top five salaries paid to Regina nurses ranged between $180,530 to $243,540.
That nurse earning $243,540 worked at Regina's Pioneer Village, causing one to question whether all overtime is really the result of a desperate shortage of emergency and critical care. That 255 out of 1,870 Regina-area full-time registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses took home more than $100,000 last year adds to such suspicions.
Starting nurses earn a base salary of $63,569 and a 20-years nurse makes a $84,168 base annually _ largely, the result of the generous 35-per-cent-plus settlement SUN (that spoke favourably of the Saskatchewan Party prior to the 2007 election) negotiated with the Wall government in 2008.
Now, Wall has the unpleasant task of justifying to farmers, business people and other wage earners why these payouts are really acceptable.
Perhaps his government needs to take a serious look at bringing these runaway OT costs under control.
Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics for over 15 years.
