DDSD Fresno, proud to be State Employees!

STATEWIDE CAMPAIGN

  Move the MOU in the legislature, attacking the layoffs, dept. closures, & talk of our proposals for helping to solve the deficit.

• Employees should not only call, email, fax, and 'snail mail' legislators, but are to actually make physical appearances in their offices
• Employees should organize to do multiple visits per day over a steady number of days
• Legislator visits do not have to be scheduled visits
• Legislators visits do not have to be only to Republicans
  
• Legislators visits do not have to be only to the abstainers
• Be prepared for REAL 'action', soon!
  

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What's wrong with
this administration?

• Think we will be getting our 20% pay back June 30th, 2010?
• Was your workload already out of control?
• Can you take your furlough days timely?
• Are you expected to provide the same services to taxpayers, even though you are working 3 less days (so far) per month?
• Are you disgusted because so many of us are NOT paid out of the General Fund and therefore VERY little or NO money is actually saved?
• Does your department actually produce revenue for CA?
• How many can't afford this additional pay cut? ... or more pay cuts?
• Did we simply delay 4 furlough days, temporarily, by calling for strike?
• The Gov's attorneys argued a case in court that there is no sufficient evidence of unpaid bills by state employees taking 2 furlough days.
• The Governor's office stated that they want to lay off 15,000 state employees and they also recommended 5 furlough days!
• It costs the state an extra $25 million each day that the budget has
  gone unfixed since the fiscal year started on July 1. Now pair that with official estimates that a single Furlough Friday equals $425 million saved when spread across 2009-2010. In other words, by July 17, lawmakers' inability to close the budget deal had burned through all the savings Schwarzenegger sought by adding that third furlough day each month.
• SEIU Local 1000 has proposed $9.5 Billion in solutions to CA's problems in the last 18 months alone, not to mention that for years we have been screaming about REAL reform for the taxpayers of California: The California Bottom Line
  
• Why won't the Governor listen?
• Instead, our Governor gave BIG oil a $2.5 billion per year tax break in February of 2009, right in the middle of these historic economic times. Chevron this year gave Schwarzenegger's special election committee $500,000, Philip Morris provided the governor's committee with $350,000, and the grand total is $1.2 million in bribes from both, that SEIU knows about.
• In the last 3 years, your Gov has closed the Fresno Medi-Cal Field Office and Fresno's Secretary of State's Office, both of which had the highest track record in the state for saving taxpayer dollars.
• Now there are more cuts to rehabilitation programs in the prisons. Released inmates will more likely return to prison costing even more tax dollars.
• How much Federal money is CA losing from cuts and closing of programs that they would have contributed to?
• Since 2008 (when the Gov called a fiscal emergency halting all hiring, promotions, overtime, etc.) the Gov signed a near $6 Billion in private contracts - work that State employees could be doing.
• Altogether there are currently $34+ billion in private contracts, that SEIU knows about, which have little or no accountability, oversight, or transparency. SEIU calls this the Hidden Branch of Government
• Are these contracted workers facing furloughs, straight time (instead of OT), threat of minimum wage, threats to their benefits, layoffs, etc.? NO!!
• Furloughs do NOT save the state money. Furloughs actually make the deficit even worse, because of the lost revenue that California loses when 200,000+ people are NOT spending money on goods and services and therefore NOT paying taxes that support the services that California needs.
• The Governor said no new taxes, including not restoring the tax breaks given to BIG oil, not taxing tabacco, but instead applies another furlough tax to the middle class workers who run the CA!
• Schwarzenegger reclined deeply in his chair, lighted an eight-inch cigar and declared himself “perfectly fine,” despite the fiscal debacle and personal heartsickness all around him. “Someone else might walk out of here every day depressed, but I don’t walk out of here depressed,” Schwarzenegger said. Whatever happens, “I will sit down in my Jacuzzi tonight,” he said. “I’m going to lay back with a stogie.” - New York Times Magazine
• SEIU currently has 4 lawsuits against the state about furloughs.
• Other Unions agree: "The governor has excluded certain elements of state government from furloughs calling them essential for public safety, but he did not exclude corrections," Corcoran (CCPOA) said. "If we are not essential public safety, then it is our belief that we may be able to strike." Corcoran said prisons never close "and so union members are literally working for free, which we believe is a violation of the law."
• The Professional Engineers in California Government said paperwork shows private contracted engineers are paid an average of $232,000 annually, compared to just $103,000 a year for state engineers.

  Ted Toppin from PECG estimates that the state could be wasting as much as $350 million.
• Attorneys for CASE and the employees successfully argued that since SCIF is financially and administratively independent, the furlough order shouldn't have included its 8,000 employees.
• The California Association of Professional Scientists has filed a lawsuit seeking a furlough exemption for its members who are "paid entirely or partly through Special Funds and/or other non-General Fund monies."
  
• Our contract, already agreed upon by the Governor's appointed people, if applied to all state employees, would save California more than $1 billion per year.
• Yes, the private sector is suffering, but isn't this even more the reason NOT to make it worse? We can get out of this deficit by encouraging spending, not by taxing the many lower-middle class workers with furloughs.
• ETC, ETC, ETC ... When is enough, enough?
• 4 or 5 furlough days?

  Cutting our pay and laying off state workers will NOT solve California's revenue problems or fix the deficit. The Governor is using the deficit as an excuse to attack us in the media, attack our wages, our benefits, and job security all because he failed tax payers with his promises to be the Governor that would reform California.

  Our 'acting' Governor is bought by BIG oil, tobacco, and the wealthy, hosting his $100,000 chicken dinners, taking pictures, signing autographs, and ultimately attacking the middle class workers who run the state.

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This web site does not officially reflect the views of SEIU Local 1000.

updated: 20100108