Connecticut Approves 4.5% Salary Increase for State Workers

The House and Senate voted Tuesday to raise some state employees’ salaries by up to 4.5% for the upcoming fiscal year, totaling $154 million.

Both the House vote (106-44 with one absent) and the Senate vote (24-12) were party-line votes, with Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed. The votes came after a protracted debate.

The rise for some of the approximately 46,000 employees covered by the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition (SEBAC) would be 4.5%, including 2.5% in a general salary increase and 2% in a step increase. Steps are pay grades that represent how long an employee has been with the state; however, not all employees are eligible for that portion of the raise.

The $154 million price tag includes $32.7 million for a 4.5% increase in the annual block grant that benefits the University of Connecticut. Rep. Mike D’Agostino, D-Hamden, stated that the money is under UConn’s authority and does not represent the only way the university pays for salaries.

Democrats claim the wage reopener funds have already been appropriated, but Republicans oppose the idea, claiming it is too generous for taxpayers.

“To the point of affordability, if we can’t afford it now, at a time when we have a huge budget reserve fund and have been putting money aside for other purposes for years, when could we ever?” said Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, Democrat of New Haven. “Now is the time we have to recognize that is a reasonable wage reopener in the SEBAC agreement, and it’s fully paid for in last year’s bipartisan budget.”

Rep. Tammy Nuccio, a Tolland Republican and the Appropriations Committee’s ranking member said she would support a 3.5% hike, including a 2% general pay and a 1.5% step increase.

If the initiative is defeated, the contract reopener will proceed to binding arbitration. The House vote occurred as a line of Senate Republicans spoke out against the bill far into the afternoon.

Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich, pointed out that, in addition to raises, state employees got additional bonuses totaling $3,500 and $1,000 throughout the contract. He said that state workers have gotten a 30% wage boost throughout the SEBAC agreement, compared to 17% for private sector workers who must pay for those public sector salaries.

“If this is fair, then I don’t know what isn’t,” Fazio stated during the Senate discussion.

Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, addressed the problem of cash payments.

“The bonuses, that were lump sum payments that allowed us to save money, should be talked about that way, so that when people listen to us, they know what happened,” Winfield went on to say. “You want to talk about unfair, it’s unfair to say we support state workers, and then talk about them in a way that we know people outside of this building will understand in a way that villainizes them.”

Some in the opposition drew similarities between private and public sector pay. Nuccio claimed that the state’s statistics are biased and do not accurately reflect reality. Several Republican senators argued that as they debated pay raises for state employees, nonprofit organizations that contribute to state services under the dual delivery system were underfunded.

“When I think back for the last ten and twenty years, I think about the costs that they have had to incur,” said Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield. “But I don’t see any cost-of-living index increases for them.” In reality, I have only recently seen rises in reimbursement rates. That is something I struggle with.

Sen. Catherine Osten, D-Sprague, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, reacted to Hwang, stating that the legislature had given organizations more than $300 million in the previous five years, with an extra $103 million added to the biennium budget.

“That’s not chump change,” Osten explained. “Not the best we could do, and we’d certainly like to be able to do more.”

The Connecticut Department of Labor says that the March 2024 private sector workweek, not seasonally adjusted, was 33.4 hours, up five-tenths of an hour from the March 2023 average of 32.9 hours, indicating a “large annual advance.” The average weekly wage in the private sector in March 2024 was $1,248.83, a 6.2% increase from the previous year.