Dear Governor Schweitzer:
Normally, I'm a big fan. I voted for you and was very pleased when you won. I have in the past defended you vigorously from spurious claims that you go in big for pot, porn, and perversion, and I would still stand up to those kinds of slanderous whack-jobs. However, and I'm only saying this because I care, I really wish you would stop talking about the death spiral of the Montana economy while simultaneously giving your employees handsome raises. The timing is probably coincidental, but it doesn't look good and it certainly doesn't engender good feelings among ordinary Montanans, some of whom had been hoping to find jobs at some point in this young decade.
It's just not good form to tell people to make plans to cut budgets that have already been cut to the bone while not doing the same yourself. People will talk. And I know that your budget director has said that these were not so much raises as increased pay for promotions, but you have to realize that elsewhere in the public and private sector, plenty of people are doing more work and getting the same--sometimes even less--pay. That's the way things work right now. Employers lay people off but the same amount of work has to get done, and that means people step up and do it. And sometimes those same remaining people take pay cuts and put up with the more work and less pay because they know it's better than the alternative, i.e. no job at all.
I also realize that your budget director has said that these raises are not costing any more money and that in fact they are saving the state money through the magic or reorganization. I have no doubt that might be true. But the fact is that many of these people--talented though I'm sure they are--were already making the kind of money that most Montanans can only dream about. One of your employees got a 5 percent raise that brought her to more than $95,000 per year. Even before that 5 percent, that's a lot of damn money in a state with some of the lowest average wages in the country. (Incidentally, the budget director himself makes $99,998. Because we totally won't notice that figure is only $2 away from $100K. Shhhh, don't tell!)
Look, I get it. And I don't begrudge people who work hard making a fair wage, I really don't. It just that out here in the rest of Montana, there are a lot of us hard-working people who haven't been making anything close to a fair wage, um, ever. And the rest of the State's workers had to agree to a pay freeze, even though they are probably doing more work than ever before as well.
Governor Schweitzer, when you proclaim loudly that all state agencies had better start preparing for budget cuts, you would do well to look home first. I don't think you're a bad guy and I don't even think that your employees didn't deserve those raises. I just think that there are plenty of people around the state who deserve them just as much but will go without because that's what they've been told they have to do. And those are the lucky ones...the ones who, you know, have jobs.
Yours sincerely,
Nicole
