Board must inject reality into negotiations

Two stories on the front page last week could not have shown more starkly the vast and growing gulf between the public and private work forces in this country.

At the top, Huntley Unit District 158 teachers rather blithely demanded pay raises in excess of 10 percent in each of the next two years. Along with that, they expect health insurance 100 percent paid for by taxpayers for employees and 90 percent paid for by taxpayers for family members.

Just below that story was a poll of Americans' views on the state of their families' economics. Fifty-six percent of all Americans said their economic situation had not improved or had regressed over the last five years. Among middle-class members, 54 percent said that over the same period, their economic situation had not changed or had gotten worse.

For the teachers of District 158 and anybody else who isn't dealing with reality, it is probably essential to point out that this year's self-assessment is the gloomiest ever since the polling began in 1964.

Poll respondents noted layoffs, pay cuts, pay freezes and increasing health-care costs. Fully 18 percent said they'd had trouble finding or paying for health-care, more than half said they'd had to cut family spending and a full 10 percent reported having been laid off.

That apparently means little to those who continue to argue they must have more in order to equal or exceed others in the public sector. The argument is typical, but it also causes the cost of government to continually spiral upward and the gulf between the two sectors to widen.

It also is an argument increasingly putting taxpayers into penury. The essential question for the District 158 school board to ask itself is: What can taxpayers actually afford to pay?

It doesn't take a rocket scientist or even a teacher to know that people with stagnant or declining wages, lost jobs and higher personal costs simply can't afford the increasing cost of keeping the public sector in the style to which it has become accustomed.

And this economic dissonance has been in play now for at least a decade or more, so the toll is growing.

We still commend teachers and the district for agreeing to keep the public apprised of negotiations as they go along. Certainly, the early demands were eye-opening for local taxpayers and showed why public information is needed.

We suspect that even the district's initial offer might seem fairly generous to the average struggling taxpayer. It offered a 4.25 percent pay hike the first year and in the succeeding three years, a raise of 0.25 percent above the rate of inflation, assuming the inflation rate is between 2 and 5 percent. The district would pay 3 percent more of teachers' health premiums.

That's still a far better deal than what many private sector workers are getting these days, a fact Huntley teachers would do well to consider.