Like many other state employees, prison nurse Nellie Larot was hit last year with furloughs that cut her salary: It dropped $10,000, to $92,000.Later in the article Jon Coupal, president of the anti-tax Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. says, "It just shows the extraordinary disconnect between the public sector and the real world. No business would operate this way."
But she more than made up for it by working extra shifts, raking in $177,512 in overtime, according to state records. Her total $270,000 in earnings last year eclipsed the $225,000 paid to Matthew Cate, head of the entire state prison system.
Despite Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision to furlough workers three days a month to save money, many employees are taking home paychecks fattened by overtime -- more than $1 billion of it last year.
No kidding.
As a supervisor I am responsible for my employees' schedules. I have to sign off on any overtime and believe me, there is no overtime. So who is in charge in California?
California is broke yet the state employees, with their unions' backing, are determined to "get theirs" even if it means that their state falls into the abyss. If the various supervisors can't figure out how to cover the necessary shifts and get the state's work done without the employees pulling down 6 figures in overtime pay the state needs to find itself some new supervisors. And if the state workers think that the taxpayers in the rest of the country are going to reach in to their own pockets to bailout a state mired in greed and corruption they can think again.
Related from Doug Ross:
Pass the popcorn, Nahanni: California organizes circular firing squad to determine who will make up its 50% shortfall in revenuesMaybe if California didn't offer amnesty to illegal aliens and deported them instead, the state wouldn't end up with so many of them in prison. Just a thought.
It's another Blue State miracle! The Gaia-friendly Democrat Utopia has hit a budgetary wall, unable to raise taxes and unwilling to cut spending to come anywhere close to meeting its obligations.
Federal judges have ordered California to thin its immense prison population by 40,000 inmates or 24% out of a total of 168,830. There are currently 22,173 illegal immigrants housed in state prisons at an annual cost of at least $32,500 each; the yearly tab for housing illegals comes to nearly three quarters of a billion dollars.
But California's powerful prison guard union wants a large prison population because it drives higher employment for guards, a profession in which annual wages for union members can easily exceed $100K. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has gone so far as to publicly pillory California's "Three Strikes" sentencing policy, stating, "The three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers’ union and that is sick!”
1 comment:
I suspect that someone used staff cuts to try and make it appear that they were saving money, but then replaced those hours with overtime.
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