Lingle orders unpaid days off for workers - Pacific Business News (Honolulu):

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In an address broadcast from the State Lingle also said she wouldc scale back free Medicaid benefitsto low-incomew adults and said the state would delay paying some of its large r bills until July. The governor is also askingh the Judiciary, the Legislature, and the Office of Hawaiiabn Affairs to implement equivalent furlough days or restric ttheir budgets. Hawaii law does not allowq ordering furloughs for the Departmentof Education, the University of Hawaiui or the Hawaii Health Systems but Lingle said theirf spending will be restricted in an amount equivalenft to the three-days-per-month The furloughs, which start July 1, amoungt to about a 13.
8 percent pay cut, or abouf $5,500 for a worker making $40,000 a As with layoffs, Lingle does not have to negotiatew the furloughs with any of the unione representing state workers. Lingle has said she doesn’gt want to lay off workers because of the disruptivre effect of contract rules that would enable senior workerswto “bump” junior workers, even if they worked in differentf state agencies. The furloughs will save $688 Lingle said the savings are needed to clos e a gapof $730 million between now and June 30, 2011, as forecast by the state’ s Council on Revenues May 28. All told, Hawaioi is expected to see tax revenues fallby $2.7 billion over the next two years.
“Idf we do not implement the furlough we would have to lay off upto 10,0000 employees to realize an equivalentr amount of savings,” Lingle said. The statre has about 46,000 workers, including 21,000 employees of the Departmentof Education. Lingle blames the fiscal shortfall on thelingering recession, rising dropping visitor arrivals, a decline in privater building permits, a doublingv of foreclosures, and record bankruptcy levels. The stats Legislature ended its session last month by raisingf tax rates onhotepl rooms, high-income earners, luxury home transactions and tobaccok to help meet the budget shortfall.
But Lingle, a Republican whose vetoes of thosr measures were overridden bymajority Democrats, said she wouldx not ask for additionalo tax increases. She also rejected callsx for legalizing gambling. However, Lingle noted that 70 percent of state operating fundw go to labor costs and that the state had provided employee wage increase of betweej 16 and 29 percent over the past fouryearsa “when our economy was thriving.
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