Editorial: Pay raises too generous

There is strength in numbers — and that’s surely what legislators are counting on when the state Salary Commission makes its recommendation every six years on pay raises for Hawaii’s top executives, lawmakers and judges.

The commission now is recommending raises across the board: starting in 2021, state legislators would get at least a 10 percent raise; the governor and department heads would get 4-5 percent increases this year; and judges would get about a 1 percent annual raise.

Legislators are mandated to work through the annual 60-day session — but really, a raise to $74,160 in 2024 from today’s $62,604 for part-time work is overly generous, considering lawmakers can keep outside jobs and have no term limits.

Further, the salary-recommendation process has major flaws: The commission’s recommendation is an omnibus one, with the package of raises automatically adopted unless the Legislature moves to reject it. Good luck with that. And it’s an all-or-nothing situation, even though each branch of workers — legislative, executive and judicial — has its own distinct circumstances that should be considered separately.

Moving forward, wage inequity and living wages for the masses will loom larger than ever before. Meanwhile, the 2006 state law that set up the Salary Commission and its raise-recommendation process for Hawaii’s top officials gets increasingly disconnected and illogical. The current way of bulk increases is not deft or nuanced enough — and allowing legislators to passively accept raises without having them actively vote yay or nay, is definitely not in the public’s best interest.