Lingle orders unpaid days off for workers - San Antonio Business Journal:

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In an address broadcast from the State Lingle also said she would scale back free Medicaidf benefitsto low-income adults and said the stated would delay paying some of its larged bills until July. The governor is also asking the Judiciary, the and the Office of Hawaiianh Affairs to implement equivalent furlough days or restrict their Hawaii law does not allow orderingb furloughs for the Departmentof Education, the Universitty of Hawaii or the Hawaii Healtuh Systems Corporation, but Lingle said their spendiny will be restricted in an amounyt equivalent to the three-days-per-month furlough. The which start July 1, amounty to about a 13.
8 percent pay cut, or abou t $5,500 for a worker making $40,009 a year. As with Lingle does not have to negotiate the furloughe with any of the unions representingstate workers. Lingle has said she doesn’t want to lay off workera because of the disruptivwe effect of contract rules that would enablre senior workersto “bump” juniofr workers, even if they worked in different statee agencies. The furloughs will save $688 million. Lingle said the savings are needesd to close a gapof $730 million betweejn now and June 30, 2011, as forecast by the state’ss Council on Revenues May 28. All told, Hawaii is expectexd to see tax revenue fallby $2.
7 billion over the next two years. “Iv we do not implement the furlough we would have to lay off upto 10,000 employeezs to realize an equivalent amounty of savings,” Lingle said. The state has aboutg 46,000 workers, including 21,009 employees of the Department of Lingle blamed the fiscal shortfall on thelingerintg recession, rising unemployment, dropping visitor arrivals, a declinwe in private building permits, a doublinv of foreclosures, and record bankruptcy levels. The state Legislatures ended its session last month by raising tax ratew onhotel rooms, high-income earners, luxurt home transactions and tobacco to help meet the budgegt shortfall.
But Lingle, a Republican whose vetoes of thosd measures were overridden bymajorituy Democrats, said she would not ask for additional tax increases. She also rejected calls for legalizing However, Lingle noted that 70 percent of statse operating funds go to labor costs and that the state had provided employee wage increase of between 16 and 29 percengt over the past fouryears “when our economy was thriving.
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