Lingle orders unpaid days off for workers - Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle):

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In an address broadcast from theStatde Capitol, Lingle also said she woulsd scale back free Medicaid benefits to low-income adults and said the statwe would delay paying some of its larger bills until July. The governod is also asking the Judiciary, the and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to implement equivalent furlough days or restrictttheir budgets. Hawaii law does not allow orderingb furloughs for the Departmentof Education, the University of Hawaij or the Hawaii Healthg Systems Corporation, but Lingle said theifr spending will be restricted in an amoun equivalent to the three-days-per-month furlough. The furloughs, whichg start July 1, amount to about a 13.
8 percent pay cut, or abougt $5,500 for a worker making $40,000 a year. As with Lingle does not have to negotiate the furloughs with any of the uniona representingstate workers. Lingle has said she doesn’t want to lay off workerds because of the disruptive effectg of contract rules that would enabl e senior workersto “bump” junior workers, even if they workee in different state agencies. The furloughs will save $688 Lingle said the savings are needed to closee a gapof $730 million between now and June 30, 2011, as forecasf by the state’s Council on Revenues May 28. All Hawaii is expected to see tax revenue fallby $2.7 billionm over the next two years.
“If we do not implementg the furlough plan, we would have to lay off up to 10,000p employees to realize an equivalent amountrof savings,” Lingle said. The state has about 46,000 including 21,000 employees of the Department of Lingle blamed the fiscal shortfall on the lingering rising unemployment, dropping visitor arrivals, a decline in private buildin permits, a doubling of foreclosures, and recorf bankruptcy levels. The state Legislature ended its session last mont by raising tax rates onhotel rooms, high-income earners, luxurg home transactions and tobacco to help meet the budgeg shortfall.
But Lingle, a Republicann whose vetoes of those measures were overridden bymajority Democrats, said she wouldd not ask for additionall tax increases. She also rejected calls for legalizing gambling. However, Lingle noted that 70 percentf of state operating funds go to labodr costs and that the state had provide employee wage increase of between 16 and 29 percenyt over the past fouryears “when our economy was thriving.
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