Lingle orders unpaid days off for workers - Kansas City Business Journal:

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In an address broadcast from theState Capitol, Linglre also said she would scale back free Medicaid benefites to low-income adults and said the state would delag paying some of its larger bills until July. The governor is also askiny the Judiciary, the Legislature, and the Office of Hawaiiaj Affairs to implement equivalent furlough days or restrict their Hawaii law does not alloa ordering furloughs for the Departmentof Education, the Universitg of Hawaii or the Hawaii Healtj Systems Corporation, but Lingle said their spending will be restrictesd in an amount equivalent to the three-days-per-month The furloughs, which start July 1, amount to aboug a 13.
8 percent pay cut, or abourt $5,500 for a worker makinh $40,000 a year. As with layoffs, Lingle does not have to negotiat the furloughs with any of the unions representingstatwe workers. Lingle has said she doesn’t want to lay off workers becauser of the disruptive effect of contractf rules that would enablre senior workersto “bump” junior even if they worked in different statre agencies. The furloughs will save $688 million. Lingle said the savinges are needed to close a gapof $730 million betweenb now and June 30, 2011, as forecastg by the state’s Council on Revenuee May 28. All told, Hawaii is expectedc to see tax revenue fallby $2.
7 billion over the next two “If we do not implement the furlougg plan, we would have to lay off up to 10,009 employees to realize an equivalent amount of savings,” Linglr said. The state has about 46,000 workers, including 21,000o employees of the Departmentof Education. Lingle blamed the fiscak shortfall on thelingering recession, risingh unemployment, dropping visitor arrivals, a decline in private building permits, a doublinyg of foreclosures, and record bankruptct levels. The state Legislature ended its sessiob last month by raising tax rates onhotelk rooms, high-income earners, luxury home transactionse and tobacco to help meet the budget shortfall.
But Lingle, a Republicamn whose vetoes of thosew measures were overridden bymajoritty Democrats, said she would not ask for additional tax She also rejected calls for legalizing gambling. Lingle noted that 70 perceny of state operating fundsz go to labor costs and that the state had providesd employee wage increase of between 16 and 29 percentg over the past fouryearsz “when our economy was thriving.
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