What Was Schwarzenegger Thinking About When He Proposed Cutting State Workers’ Pay to the Minimum Wage?

Sacramento Bee political cartoonist Rex Babin had a field day with it in Sunday’s paper, portraying a muscle bound Schwarzenegger as a bully on a beach kicking sand at state employees after state legislators had kicked sand on him.

Perhaps the most biting comment came from a columnist who is usually the Democrats and the legislature’s biggest nemesis, Dan Walters. Under the title of “Governor's pay-cut plan for state workers is just another gimmick” in the Sacramento Bee, started off with this:

“We may not be getting effective governance from movie star-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but we can count on a steady diet of grandiose, and usually hollow, political gestures.

“Who could forget, for instance, the time that Schwarzenegger posed with a gigantic faucet, out of which flowed a red liquid, to dramatize budget deficits? Or the time he denounced the Legislature as "girlie men" for delaying budget action?

“Having promised and utterly failed to end "crazy deficit spending," Schwarzenegger is resorting once again to cheesy stunts, this time a threat to reduce the salaries of tens of thousands of state employees to the federal minimum wage, supposedly to hoard the state's dwindling cache of cash in the absence of a new state budget. His aides insist no final decision has been made – and when this was published Wednesday, it touched off a storm of protest from state workers and their unions, including a noisy demonstration at the Capitol on Thursday.

“What the governor hopes to accomplish from this stunt is beyond obscure; it's opaque.”

The state’s most conservative newspaper, the libertarian Orange County Register editorialized: “Minimum-wage rollback a minimally smart idea: Cutting state workers' pay until budget resolved would wind up costing even more”.

Even the San Diego Union, while of the opinion that some kind of initiative for the voters would be a better way to get a budget, said this of Schwarzenegger’s actions:

“Schwarzenegger is governor of California, not emperor of Austria. If he got his way, springing this plan on hundreds of thousands of workers and their dependents with just a few days advance warning would be seen as an authoritarian, bad-faith stunt.”

And the Union took this last swipe at Schwarzenegger: “The mood nowadays, though, feels far more like 2003 – when voter anger swept Gov. Gray Davis from office.”

The oft conservative Riverside Press-Enterprise ran an editorial calling it a “budget stunt.” The San Francisco Chronicle called Schwarzenegger “A stunt man governor.”

The San Bernardino Sun editorialized, under the headline “Workers unfairly targeted in impasse.”

I can’t find a single editorial that thinks this was a wise move. What were the Governor and his staff thinking?

But perhaps what is most bothersome here is that it is a continuation of an abdication by the Governor of real leadership on the budget. It started with a budget that was DOA in January and that the Governor knew could never pass—one with closures of state parks and the like. We are now at the end of July, and diversions like this from the real hard lifting that is needed to get a budget passed, are just that—diversions. If that is what the Governor intended with this Swiftian “modest idea,” then maybe he has achieved that. We will have a vote on the budget tomorrow in the Senate according to plan. The Democrats will put up their votes. Can the Governor deliver some Republican votes?