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Gov. Mike Parson is well versed in .

This is the name given to a management training system created by a consultant for state employees. The consultant’s name is Drew Erdmann. Officially, he was the state’s chief operating officer, brought into government service by disgraced former Gov. Eric Greitens, the Republican who resigned before Parson took his place. Erdmann had come out of the big-time consulting world, having worked for that giant of all consulting companies, McKinsey & Co.

In The Missouri Way, state employees don’t make decisions; they hire consultants who make decisions. Take McKinsey, for instance. During the time its former consultant, Erdmann, was working for the state, Missouri awarded McKinsey a $2.7 million contract to try to make the Medicaid program more efficient. The bid was more expensive than three of the other bidders’ proposals combined. Only one consultant, Accenture, offered a more expensive bid. More about it later.

During the time McKinsey was advising the state about how to improve delivery of Medicaid, about 100,000 poor kids were kicked off the program and denied health care. Now that’s efficiency in action.

Then there’s Parson’s action last week. As first reported by the Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson, the governor asked another global consulting giant, Accenture, to figure out how to pay workers in the troubled children’s services department more money. The study will cost $500,000 and will be paid to a consultant who has already billed the state $10 million in the past year for various activities.

Lawmakers already know the answer to the question. The way to pay state workers more is to budget raises during the legislative process. That’s what the Missouri Legislature did this year, seeking to add $2 million to the budget to increase the pay of children’s services workers.

Parson vetoed the money, suggesting it wasn’t fair to single out one group of state workers over another. He’s got a point. Missouri’s state workers are the lowest-paid state workers in the nation. We know that because of a consultant’s study. Well, more than one of them.

The first such study , under the administration of Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat. It found what everybody already knew: that Missouri, which has among the lowest taxes in the country, doesn’t pay state workers well — lowest in the nation in some categories.

Republicans pounced.

“Missouri’s state employees are its number one asset, and these employees have grown weary of decades of political-speak about improving their pay. This study will provide a mechanism to move from talk to action,� said state Sen. Mike Kehoe.

He was the Senate floor leader at the time. Now he’s the lieutenant governor, preparing to run, more than likely, to replace Parson in the next election cycle.

By then, Missouri will remain in about the same place, with low-paid workers but a lot of consultants with high-priced lobbyists doing quite well. The same company that completed the worker pay study in 2016, St. Louis-based CBIZ Human Capital Services, updated it in 2019. Same answer: State employee pay in Missouri is still the lowest in the nation.

The same year that study came out, Parson decided to punish his lowest-paid-in-the-nation corrections workers by trying to break their union. The union, which had typically endorsed Republicans for office, didn’t support Parson’s election bid, perhaps because Parson was refusing to pay them overtime that a judge said they were owed. As they negotiated a new contract — or sought to anyway — the governor stopped collecting union dues from paychecks.

Last week, a judge ordered Parson to stop his unconstitutional action. Who knows what that legal battle has cost taxpayers, but it’s surely money that could have gone to increase state worker pay, if Parson was interested in doing that. Parson has also been ordered by a judge to engage in union negotiations with several other groups of state workers. Perhaps the good folks at Accenture will come up with some simple advice for the governor: If you really want to increase pay to state workers, it would help if you talked to their unions rather than adopting anti-worker policies intended to tamp down on their pay and ability to exercise their constitutional rights.

It shouldn’t be hard to find the money to increase worker pay. That CBIZ study in 2019 said it would take about $15 million to bring Missouri state worker pay up to reasonable “market� level. Parson has spent more than that on consultants in the past year.

On the state’s that touts The Missouri Way, Parson gives advice to his fellow state employees:

“Change takes hard work and to put others above oneself,� he says. “You will have to change. ... If you want to reform state government — if you want to make it better — it will be on your shoulders to do that.�

It’s hard work negotiating with unions and working with lawmakers to find money for raises for the lowest-paid state workers in the country. Apparently, standing on the shoulders of a global management consultant or two will get the job done. Eventually.