It will be time to pay the piper when the Legislature convenes in January, as the fallout from a public employee labor agreement struck earlier this year finally lands.

That’s because Gov. Neil Abercrombie has settled with the United Public Workers, and its white-collar sibling has found its own contract wanting by comparison. The Hawaii Government Employees Association was the first to strike a deal with the new administration last spring, but in doing so the union exacted a price: a "favored nation" clause, which enables it to reopen the agreement if any other public union receives a better deal.

The other shoe dropped this month when UPW announced its two-year contract, ratified last week. HGEA quickly identified the sections in the rival accord that seem superior, including a no-layoff commitment for the life of the contract.

But the widest gulf between the two agreements is undoubtedly over the straight 5 percent pay cut the HGEA agreed to absorb in lieu of unpaid time off. By contrast, the UPW insisted on achieving labor savings for the state by taking 14 unpaid days of leave the first year and 13 more days the next. This means its pay scale remains the same — which translates into higher pay for any overtime hours worked — while OT accrued by HGEA members will bring in less money.

Just how much of an extra cost item this represents for the state is unknown until the HGEA contract is revised, but from this standpoint the "favored nation" may prove more trouble than it was worth, causing more labor relations upheaval than Hawaii needs. It may have been a potent aid in closing the HGEA deal early — which was viewed as a boon last spring, given the fast-moving budget meltdown — but it probably shouldn’t be an active element in the state’s collective-bargaining toolkit, going forward. The less one negotiated settlement can be played against another, the better.

Straight pay cuts have cost-savings advantages over furloughs — which is what the unpaid time off is, regardless of how much the administration wanted to steer clear of the term. But where it’s possible to schedule in the furloughs without disrupting public service, they represent a reasonable alternative; the state needn’t tie itself up in knots to avoid them.

Should HGEA manage to substitute furloughs for the pay cuts, it becomes incumbent on the state department managers to hold the line as much as possible on overtime. The bottom line should be avoidance of excess labor expenditures.

The final messages in the ongoing labor drama include this heads-up to the taxpayer: The state doubtlessly will continue chasing a deficit during the coming legislative session. There will be pressure, once again, to reduce spending, though it’ll be even harder to find low-hanging cuts to make. Or, the heat will be on again to drum up more revenue somehow.

And to the HGEA: There may be a lesson to glean from the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly’s successful negotiation with the UH administration. In that 2009 case, the faculty union was able to nail down a deal that was relatively lucrative over the long term, in exchange for sacrifice in the near term. Given the state’s still-wobbly fiscal condition, HGEA now finds itself in such a bargaining position. Calculating a deal over a longer horizon may pull a punch that would be painful for the state to absorb just now, in exchange for a more advantageous future for its members.