Responding to today’s report on the state’s longevity payment system to reward senior employees of ten years or more, House Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero, R-Norwalk, urged the General Assembly to convene to cancel April’s checks to non-union workers.
Longevity pay is issued in equal installments in April and in October to union and non-union state employees and managers, with members of the latter group in particular in some cases earning thousands-of-dollars.
Cafero acknowledged since the longevity pay is currently part of collective bargaining, it likely cannot be addressed until those contracts expire. But he said the Democratic-majority legislature could immediately act on the 1960s-era statute authorizing longevity payments to delay the April round.
Earlier this week Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s Office of Labor Relations told me that a court could strike down such an effort to halt ongoing payments to qualified employees because at that point it is considered part of their wages. That is why Rell last year proposed stopping longevity payments for new hires and capping them, rather than eliminating them, for current staff.
So, for example, an employee of 14 years would continue receiving the annual longevity payment they began earning on their tenth anniversary, but no longer qualify for the increases for 15, 20 and 25-years of service.
Cafero doesn’t buy it.
“Emergency times need emergency action,” he said, referring to the ongoing budget crisis. “Any lawyer or any person could make an argument out of anything. But you know what? We can’t chase the law in this case. We’ve got to let the law chase us.”
Cafero said whether one is a “fiscal conservative” looking for ways to cut the deficit or a “social program liberal” hoping to preserve funding for an initiative, everyone should be able to agree the longevity payments have a better use.
“To me it’s a no-brainer,” he said. “And I say that without casting any aspersions against the recipients. That’s not their fault. They’re just getting what’s entitled them by the process we put in place. I can’t vilify any one person who receives it.”
