Your article, “State pay hikes soar – for some” (March 4), is misleading. The high salaries and raises you cite are paid only to a tiny number of state workers. While these numbers, as you state, do “contrast starkly” with the wages and raises of rank-and-file employees, there is another group of state workers that’s being left even further behind.

The state’s 35,000 “excluded” employees – its managers, supervisors, confidential and exempt workers – have received only two raises in the past eight years: 4 percent in 2000 and 3.4 percent in 2007. This has hardly kept up with the cost of living. As a result, the state’s management team – myself included - generally make far less than people in similar jobs in the private sector, and many of them even earn less than the rank-and-file employees they supervise.

The difference: The rank-and-file employees are covered by collective bargaining contracts that are negotiated every two years, and we are not.

You are fanning an erroneous stereotype when you imply that state workers are overpaid. The men and women I know in state service are more likely underpaid, but they are hard-working and dedicated to doing a good job for the people of California.

(signed) Tim Behrens, ACSS President