CA's Overtime Binge: Prison Nurse Earned $269K in 2010 (layoffs, school)

[18Montclair]

A perfect example of our skewed priorities.

State government workers arent to blame, its the people we elect into office that dole out buckets of cash in overtime to one group, while laying off thousands of others and decimating the budgets of other groups.

WTF?

Keller got more overtime in 2010 than any other state employee. In all, California’s public workers collected $1.7 billion of extra pay last year, more than half of it in overtime, state payroll data show.

California paid the additional wages -- enough to fund the average salaries of about 25,000 teachers -- as it faced a $19 billion deficit and cut school spending and services for poor children and the elderly.

Nurse Making $269,810 Demonstrates California’s Overtime Binge - Businessweek

[Fontucky]

"Collective-bargaining rights granted to state workers by Governor Jerry Brown, a 73-year-old Democrat, when he first held the office three decades ago made it more difficult to pursue cost-cutting measures such as eliminating extra pay allowances or privatizing prisons."

And some wonder why I'd vote for my dog before I would Brown?

[a34dadsf]

Its always special interest non-sense and that's why California's utopian liberal ideals never work. The money always get stolen, scammed or misallocated. Its like that at every level of government.

[esmith143]

It is a vicious circle, it works this way for many classes of state workers (prison, police, fire), and, as always, the people to blame are the conservatives.

It goes like this:

* Conservatives make a lot of fuss about bloated government and excess spending.

* State workers are hit with hiring freezes and layoffs.

* Since the amount of work that needs to be done remains the same (or goes up - our prison population, for example, has grown several times since 1990), it does not disappear just because conservatives complain about bloated governement, it means that there are fewer people to do the same amount of work.

* Which means that workaholics with no life can get a lot of overtime.

* And there's always one extreme workaholic in the population of 300,000 state workers with no life whatsoever who managed to work 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, including weekends, holidays and nightshifts, and got paid accordingly.

* Conservatives point at that workaholic and start complaining about bloated government and/or "utopian liberal ideals".

* Flush, rinse and repeat.

Some people say that, once upon a time, long, long time ago, there was this special kind of conservative politicians in this country, the ones who understood that the government was there for a reason, that well-funded K-12 and state university programs were crucial to the success of the country, and, as recently as the early 90's, some would even dare to consider universal healthcare proposals which included the dreaded M word and immigration reforms that included the A word. But that kind of conservatives is gone. Now all we have is people who cater to the desires of the top 1% (whose primary desire is to pay less taxes, and whose agenda is to destroy the government, consequences be damned) and deeply misinformed religious kooks. When those come to power, all sorts of weird things start happening.

[Matt Kim]

You mean this isn't what we were talking about when it came to capping the income of healthcare providers to cut costs?