The Red Line

This week was Tax Week. Fittingly, Connecticut taxpayers found out why their taxes are so high and why various new taxes keep popping up (such as public benefits charges on utility bills).

Thursday, the U.S. Census released new data showing average Connecticut state employee wages in 2025 were $101,500, the second highest of the 50 states – second only to California.

That’s more than 15% higher than the national average of $87,750 for state employees (about 24% higher than the national average excluding California). It takes a lot of tax revenue to pay such high wages.

There appears to be a misconception among Connecticut Democrats and the media that Republicans have abandoned their call for a state employee wage freeze.

Most Senate Republicans did vote last week for a wage increase for the state’s lowest-paid workers in the Service & Maintenance NP-2 union. According to data from the State Comptroller, about 600 of the 3,600 NP-2 workers are custodians who made an average of about $42,000 last fiscal year. That’s only $9,000 above the federal poverty line for a family of four.

There’s a world of difference between voting to raise the pay of state workers who qualify for food stamps and approving a raise for the rest of state workers making an average of $95,000.

Governor Lamont has yet to announce actual new contracts for more than three-quarters of the state workforce. He claims to have reached tentative agreements with 10 more unions with a combined 20,000 employees (out of almost 50,000).

Conventionally, Connecticut governors negotiate omnibus wage contracts for state employees with the State Employee Bargaining Alliance Coalition (SEBAC), an umbrella group comprised of over 30 union bargaining units representing most state employees. Not Ned Lamont, not this year.

Most of the state’s nearly 50,000 employees have been working without a wage contract since the last omnibus, so-called SEBAC 2022, expired last June. Until this week, Lamont had struck deals with only the state police (not members of SEBAC) and three small “law and order” SEBAC units, which the General Assembly approved without much notice.

Now, Lamont has submitted a larger contract covering about 4,000 Service and Maintenance employees (bargaining unit “NP-2”) for a vote in the General Assembly this week. Yesterday, the House approved it; today, the Senate votes. That will leave over 40,000 employees still awaiting a new contract.

Why the piecemeal approach?

Likely, because ...

The “Lamont Decade” is shaping up to be a golden age for state employees, with Lamont poised to deliver workers a whopping 60% pay raise or a $2.7 billion payroll increase from $4.6 billion to $7.3 billion over ten years. That’s for slightly less than 50,000 employees.

He needs to be stopped right now. Next November's election will be too late. Even if defeated, Lamont will have left an indelibly disastrous imprint on the state.

Lamont wants to give union members four more years of robust 4.5% annual pay raises, a deal identical to the one he gave them four years ago, which followed two years of 5.5% increases. These ten increases compound to about 60%.

The first 6 years have already delivered state employees a 33% compound wage increase.

This would not just be a massive payroll increase. Pension obligations would skyrocket.

Some news media coverage of Connecticut state employee compensation misinforms the public. Periodic news articles titillate readers with the pay of the state’s highest earners. Yet, six high-paid UCONN athletic coaches and 33 high-paid UCONN Health doctors are not the reason that the overall state payroll has exploded under Governor Lamont.

The problem is that Lamont is giving away the farm. He has awarded the unionized workforce six consecutive annual wage increases that have driven up pay by a stunning 33%. And he is poised to award a seventh. Instead, he should freeze wages.

As the new year dawns, Ned is in a fix. Should he finally freeze wages or deliver another pay raise?

His two-term predecessor, Democrat Dannel Malloy, froze state employee wages three times, leading the Hearst newspapers in Connecticut to run my recent column with a headline asking the pointed question “Why Can’t Lamont Freeze Wages?"

Trouble is, last spring Ned promised a state employee union convention “Every year that I’ve been here you’ve gotten a raise, and every year I’m here, you’re going to get a raise.”

Lamont was “here” in 2025, but state employees did not get a raise. They have been working without a wage contract since last June 30th. 

State employees have received annual pay raises every one of Ned’s first six years in office. The raises compound to a whopping 33%, super-rich wages that elicited the Hearst headline implicitly asking “isn’t that enough?”

Can Ned deliver a seventh consecutive annual pay raise?

Maybe...

Recently, a Connectiocut state employee accused me of misrepresentation in saying that state employee wages have increased 33% during Governor Lamont’s six years in office. He claimed to have received only 15%, which was wildly inaccurate. My column set the record straight.

This week, another state employee attacked me. While acknowledging the 33% six-year wage increase, he accused me of ignoring four years of zero increases surrounding the six Lamont years. This week’s accuser is a well-paid member of the faculty of UCONN Health; let’s call him “the professor.”

First, the only year this side of the six years is the current fiscal year, in which there are no zeros.