Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker speaks at the RNC in Tampa, Florida (Reuters)
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker isn’t known for being a job creator. In fact throughout his tenure Wisconsin has performed very poorly in that respect, remaining near the bottom of the country for a significant period of time.
According to a new report, Walker has personally created several “phantom jobs” — jobs that don’t actually exist — to circumvent pay limits for his cronies.
Wisconsin state personnel rules limit the amount employees salary can rise each year. But according to a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel report, the Walker administration has repeatedly used “phantom job transfers” to evade state pay limits to give significant raises to multiple employees — including the state’s key economist. [...]
Wisconsin Department of Revenue chief economist John Koskinen, for example, was “transferred through three different high-level jobs at the state Department of Administration and then back to his original post, picking up bumps in his pay as he ping-ponged among them. Along the way, the longtime state employee shed his status as a political appointee and strengthened his civil-service job protections.” While Koskinen was “never expected to do any work at his shadow jobs,” the maneuver increased his salary 14.4 percent, to $114,917 — more than double the median Wisconsin household income. Koskinen’s defense of Walker’s economic record was widely circulated by supporters in the lead-up to the unsuccessful 2012 gubernatorial recall vote. The phantom job method was also used to give significant pay raises to other employees.
This would look very bad on it’s own, but it looks especially egregious when you consider Walker’s vast offensive against public employees that included stripping employees of their bargaining rights and cutting billions of dollars from the state’s education budget.
We’re told public employees are overpaid and living decadent lives while Walker himself is creating phony positions and funneling his cronies through them so he can boost their pay.