After the courts, what?

State public employee unions won a restraining order halting day-a-week furloughs, and

legal experts say they have a strong case when the legality of that concept is weighed against

existing state worker contracts in court. So the jobs stay, for now. But so do the costs.

State payroll accounts for 20 percent of state spending, with much of the rest accounted

for by mandated program spending such as Medicaid. It's a major cost center, and the state is

in major revenue trouble, with a $9.2 billion deficit.

Having been rejected by the court in his effort to save $30 million every two weeks through

the furlough plan until a state budget is passed, Gov. David A. Paterson has a choice to make

about what he should do to address payroll costs. The courts suggest he take other measures.

The other measures are obvious, and even worse for state workers: layoffs.

Those cuts could involve even more workers, and involve complete instead of partial loss of

pay.

It's not as if the state has a lean work force. The number of state workers grew for years

before the fiscal crisis hit, and since the start of the crunch cost-cutting has trimmed only

3,640 positions — 1.6 percent. This proposed budget would cut only 674 full-time

positions statewide. That's absurd.

State labor costs are, in fact, growing. According to the nonpartisan Citizens Budget

Commission, total compensation is expected to reach $22.2 billion — an increase of $3.3

billion — by fiscal year 2013-2014. By that year, the even more rapidly growing cost of

fringe benefits is projected to reach 60 percent as a share of salary. Health insurance costs

are expected to grow by 40 percent and pension costs by 184 percent.

The proper place to seek solutions lies in the budget process, and in contract

negotiations. But the Democrat-backing unions, holding huge sway over the Democrat-controlled

state government, have blocked the budget process.

In many unions, the rank and file would take a cut in wages rather than see their brothers

and sisters laid off. There seems no such selflessness in the state's public employee unions.

Instead, the mantra involves such supposed cost-cutting measures as hiring more state workers

to do work now contracted out to the private sector — which means taking on more

fringe-benefit obligations as well as salaries for workers who, obviously, the unions will

fight to keep on the payroll perpetually and not just when the work is needed.

Thirty-eight states are running deficits and 16 have launched worker furlough plans. Six

actually have been implemented, with the rest facing the same kinds of challenges as New

York's. Services to citizens are delayed, but available. That's part of tough times, and

citizens can protest that at the polls when they consider the state politics that created such

messes.

For now, the courts and the unions have left the governor with no good option short of

layoffs to cut state payroll costs at a time when the state simply is running out of cash.

That, too, is a form of negotiation — but not a good one.

The governor has the political and legal cover, now that his furlough proposal has been

denied, to institute layoffs. His goal should be significant savings; $1 billion in savings,

four times the amount he had included in his January budget proposal before the deficit

widened, would amount to less than 4 percent of payroll.

The real solution, though, is a responsible state budget, one that deals seriously with the

need for structural, benefits and program changes that cut spending. State taxpayers — a

group that includes state workers, except in retirement — shoulder the highest combined

tax burden in the nation, and they need that relief if New York ever is to have a real chance

to return to prosperity.