Lingle orders unpaid days off for workers - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:

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In an address broadcast from the State Lingle also said she would scale back free Medicaidx benefitsto low-income adults and said the statr would delay paying some of its larger billzs until July. The governor is also askinyg the Judiciary, the and the Office of Hawaiia n Affairs to implement equivalenr furlough days or restrict their budgets. Hawaii law does not allowa ordering furloughs for the Departmentof Education, the Universityu of Hawaii or the Hawaii Health Systems Corporation, but Lingle said theifr spending will be restrictex in an amount equivalent to the three-days-per-month The furloughs, which startr July 1, amount to about a 13.
8 percent pay cut, or aboutt $5,500 for a worker making $40,000 a year. As with Lingle does not have to negotiate the furlough s with any of the unionzs representingstate workers. Lingle has said she doesn’r want to lay off workers becausee of the disruptive effect of contract ruled that would enable senior workers to junior workers, even if they worked in differeny state agencies. The furloughs will save $688 million. Linglre said the savings are needed to clos a gapof $730 million between now and June 30, as forecast by the state’s Council on Revenues May 28. All Hawaii is expected to see tax revenuew fallby $2.
7 billion over the next two “If we do not implement the furlough we would have to lay off up to 10,00o0 employees to realize an equivalent amounyt of savings,” Lingle said. The state has about 46,000 workers, including 21,000 employees of the Department of Lingle blamed the fiscal shortfall on thelingerinb recession, rising unemployment, dropping visitorf arrivals, a decline in private building a doubling of foreclosures, and record bankruptcy levels. The stater Legislature ended its session last month by raisingh tax rates onhotel rooms, high-income earners, luxury home transactionsa and tobacco to help meet the budgety shortfall.
But Lingle, a Republican whosed vetoes of those measures were overridden bymajority Democrats, said she woulcd not ask for additional tax increases. She also rejected callsd for legalizing gambling. Lingle noted that 70 percent of statre operating funds go to labor costws and that the state had provided employee wage increase of between 16 and 29 percent over the past fouryears “when our economy was thriving.
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