Today the California Budget is officially late and no one should be surprised.  The California State Legislature, controlled by Assembly Democrat Karen Bass and Senate Democrat Darrell Steinberg failed to produce a budget that that was built to live within California’s means, instead relying on borrowing from local governments — at great cost to local social services — and establishing new taxes on oil and cigarettes.  They made no attempt to negotiate a reasonable budget with GOP leaders and instead called a last minute budget vote on Sunday evening to approve an unethical majority-vote budget — which attempts to raise taxes by circumventing the California Constitution and was promised a veto from Governor Schwarzenegger.

Governor Schwarzenegger, being put between a rock and a hard place, has declared a budget emergency and instituted a third furlough day — where State Employees are getting a third day off each month without pay.  Each state employee’s pay is now roughly 15% less than it would be if they were working full hours.

Eventually, state leaders should start to consider the quality of the employment opportunity they are offering their workers.  If the Governor issues a fourth or fifth furlough day to help reduce the state payroll, all state employees will be working 3/4 time or less.  If California wants to retain it’s quality workers, its leaders need to consider layoffs instead of furloughs.  The Governor has issued tentative layoff notices to 20,000 employees, but is only acting on 5,000 of the notices.  Why not lay off more employees to prevent additional furlough days?

The employees who remain will avoid having to find second jobs to fill in the 20% of their paycheck that is missing.  Also, the laid off employees are eligible for unemployment insurance benefits to help them stay afloat until they can find reasonable jobs in the private sector or in other states.  It sounds terrible to lay people off, but the fact of the matter is that not all of the public employees have to suffer, and making them all suffer is probably a greater injustice than laying off 5% of the workforce.

Many public employees might be accepting furloughs because they believe that they are a temporary situation and that eventually they will be returned to full time hours.  That may be true, but if it is the case then furloughs will be up again next year when California is in a similar financial crunch.  The reason furloughs are occurring is because there are too many people on the state payroll.  Layoffs are an alternative to permanent or seasonal furloughs.

Some might argue that increasing taxes is a solution to the over sized state employee payroll problem.  That may be true also, but California has the largest personal and business tax burden of any state in the United States.  We already tax our people more than any other state government.  How can we justify widening the taxation gap even further when other states are managing to pay their bills with a smaller amount of money?

This is the question state workers should ask themselves — Would it be better for a few members of our workforce be let go to preserve everyone else’s jobs?  A reasonable person would answer yes.