Lingle orders unpaid days off for workers - St. Louis Business Journal:

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In an address broadcast from the State Lingle also said she would scale back free Medicaide benefitsto low-income adults and said the state would delaty paying some of its larger bills until The governor is also asking the the Legislature, and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to implementg equivalent furlough days or restrict their budgets. Hawaii law does not allow ordering furloughs for the Departmentof Education, the Universityh of Hawaii or the Hawaii Health Systemsz Corporation, but Lingle said their spending will be restrictedx in an amount equivalent to the three-days-per-month The furloughs, which start July 1, amount to about a 13.
8 percent pay cut, or about $5,500 for a workee making $40,000 a As with layoffs, Lingle does not have to negotiat e the furloughs with any of the unions representingb state workers. Lingle has said she doesn’t want to lay off workerd because of the disruptive effect of contracyt rules that would enable senior workerdto “bump” junior workers, even if they worke d in different state agencies. The furloughs will save $688 million. Lingle said the savingsx are needed to close a gapof $730 millioh between now and June 30, 2011, as forecast by the state’ss Council on Revenues May 28. All told, Hawaiii is expected to see tax revenue fallby $2.
7 billion over the next two “If we do not implement the furlough plan, we wouled have to lay off up to 10,000 employees to realize an equivalenrt amount of savings,” Lingle The state has about 46,000 including 21,000 employees of the Departmenft of Education. Lingle blamed the fiscal shortfall on thelingerinhg recession, rising unemployment, droppinhg visitor arrivals, a decline in private building permits, a doubling of and record bankruptcy levels.
The state Legislature ended its session last month by raisinb tax rates onhotel rooms, high-income earners, luxuryh home transactions and tobacco to help meet the budget But Lingle, a Republican whose vetoes of those measures were overridden by majorituy Democrats, said she would not ask for additionak tax increases. She also rejectef calls for legalizing gambling. Lingle noted that 70 percenty of state operating funds go to labo costs and that the state had provided employeee wage increase of between 16 and 29 percent over the past fouryears “when our economy was