Are these the kinds of increases YOU are getting in YOUR position in the PRIVATE sector?
The tentative three-year contract, which must be approved by the supervisors and ratified by members of Service Employees International Union, Local 660, would give most union members raises totaling up to 15.5 percent.
The contract also calls for a 10 percent increase in the county's contribution to employee health plans and a benefit that would require the county to pay $75 to $375 a month to help employees pay for child care.
The contract would boost some workers' pay as much as 30 percent and union officials hailed the deal as key to helping the county retain and hire more nurses and help lift workers who now qualify for food stamps out of poverty.
$375 a month for CHILD CARE? Don't have them if you can't afford them.
That is unsustainable. SOMEONE is going to have to pay for this, Guess who? You can bet rich Liberals will protect their tax loopholes.
What's laughable is that the very people "celebrating" and anticipating these lovely wage increases won't be so happy when they realize they won't see any of it. They will be taxed away.
Democrats will never learn that this kind of sillyness is inflationary. The only way to raise the standard of living is to lower it's costs, rather than to keep asking for more money, which in turn comes from increased taxes, raising the cost of living. An endless cycle which began when nanny state idealists began raising taxes to pay for the government institutions which eat up most of the money and help no-one.
After taxes, I got $8.50 a week. It could have been worse, 25% of the staff got laid off.
This is just another example of government workers living in a fantasy world.
The contract is nothing but a payoff to get them to vote for Angelides for governor.
The only people who will be able to afford to live in Southern California - from San Diego to LA - will be State workers. And I'm not trying to be funny.
Everything in California is so deeply disconnected from reality that I really cannot evaluate the wisdom of this contract. Given the ridiculous housing prices, desperate overcrowding of decaying infrastructure, escalated cost of living, excessive taxation, and paucity of common sense, you couldn't get me to consider moving to most of California even if you offered to quadruple my income. Perhaps southern California now experiences inflation (5% per year--this is a three-year contract) to a degree virtually absent in the remainder of the country. I'd say that the county's still ripping off its workforce--but then again, if I lived in California as a pauper, I would have joined the millions of American conservatives fleeing the state.