Layoff talk sidestepped in outsourcing

Private companies are doing more and more of the work once performed by state employees, and Gov. Bobby Jindal is proposing new rounds of privatization in his latest budget proposal. The shift has forced thousands of people from their jobs, a consequence the Jindal administration tends to gloss over as it touts the lowest number of state workers in decades.

Care for the developmentally disabled, ferries to transport people across the Mississippi River and the lock-up and monitoring of criminals housed in an Avoyelles Parish prison would be farmed out to private businesses under the governor’s 2012-13 budget plans.

The outsourcing of services is an easy way for Jindal to trim state operating costs – even if long-term savings are uncertain – and to show his conservative, cost-cutting credentials around the nation.

But the administration seems to dislike acknowledging the side effect of privatization in a down economy: hundreds upon hundreds of workers given pink slips.

When the budget is presented, the administration regularly talks of eliminating positions. When talk comes of how many of those jobs are filled, administration leaders repeatedly say those employees could be shifted elsewhere or hired by the private companies that will pick up the work, which is sometimes true.

But they bristle when filled positions are equated to layoffs.

Some employees leave before they’re forced out of their jobs, others are laid off and even those eventually tapped by private companies often are hired at far lower salaries and with fewer benefits than paid by the state, worsening their economic situation.

Jindal doesn’t want to offer the detail that by getting to the lowest number of state employees in more than 20 years, he’s also added people to state unemployment rolls in the already poverty-ridden state.

The $25.5 billion budget proposal for the fiscal year that begins July 1 could lead to up to 2,700 more layoffs in state agencies.

Jindal proposes selling a state prison in Avoyelles; hiring a private company to run a state employee health care plan in the Office of Group Benefits; and privatizing two facilities that care for developmentally disabled people in Hammond and Bossier City. The operations of ferries in Gretna, Algiers and Chalmette also would be turned over to private companies.

Nearly 6,400 positions would be eliminated, most of them at public colleges, state-run health care facilities and prisons. More than 2,700 of those jobs are currently filled.

Even before those cuts, the state has nearly 14,000 fewer full-time employees than when Jindal took office four years ago.

Data from the state civil service department, provided to the governor’s Division of Administration, show Louisiana had about 80,000 full-time state employees at the end of 2011, compared to 93,600 at the end of 2007.

While most of the reductions involved elimination of vacant jobs, attrition and retirements, at least 2,000 were layoffs, mainly in health care, higher education and the corrections department, according to civil service reports.

Prison guards, health workers, lawyers, pilots, nuisance animal trappers, pharmacists, clerical staff and midlevel bureaucrats have gotten pink slips in the past few years.

Hundreds of workers have lost their jobs in the Department of Health and Hospitals, which is continuing an aggressive effort to privatize and consolidate state-run health facilities and steer patients to less-costly community-based facilities.

Among those facilities turned to the management of private companies are state-run group homes for the developmentally disabled, substance abuse treatment centers and psychiatric treatment facilities.

Jindal administration budget discussions and legislative hearings often spend little time describing how the data translate to real people and how their budget-cutting decisions add to the unemployment rolls.

That effect deserves acknowledgment, even if state officials believe the decisions are right for the budget.