Free Republic

EU governments were entitled to strike down a 1.7 percent pay rise for EU staff during the economic crisis, the bloc’s top court ruled Tuesday (19 November.) The Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice (ECJ) backed a decision by governments to reject the salary hike to 2011 wages proposed by the European Commission. Under the EU’s staff regulations, the European Commission made an annual proposal on officials’ pay and pensions to governments. … However, the court found that governments were within their rights in 2011 to invoke the “crisis clause” in the regulations allowing them to override the “method” in the...

Without the knowledge of most state lawmakers, a last-minute bill amendment that allows Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to approximately double the salaries of his top appointees was slipped into a legislation ratifying a new contract with California Highway Patrol officers. The bill, which passed overwhelmingly in both houses of the Legislature, contains two short paragraphs allowing the Department of Personnel Administration to boost the pay of Schwarzenegger's Cabinet secretaries, department directors and commissioners to as much as 125 percent of the governor's salary, which climbs to $206,500 in December. If the administration adopts the maximum increases, for example, the salaries of...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The University of California paid 2,275 employees more than $200,000 last fiscal year, up 30 percent over two years, even as the system continued to cut student services and increase fees, a newspaper reported Monday. The salary hikes, revealed during a review of payroll records by the San Francisco Chronicle, occurred as the school raised student service fees 79 percent. UC has recently frozen pay hikes for lower-paid workers, such as custodians. "This is a huge inequity," said Norah Foster, a library assistant at the University of California, Berkeley, and executive board member of the Coalition...

<p>BATON ROUGE - Most Louisiana sheriffs and all clerks of court are in line for pay raises this legislative session even though lawmakers have blocked pay raises for statewide elected officials.</p> <p>The difference is sheriffs and clerks are paid with self-generated local funds, not state money.</p>

House and Senate lawmakers have begun to marshal support for legislation that would amount to a backdoor pay raise for themselves and their staffs, in excess of the level endorsed by President Bush. Bush is seeking to curb the salaries of civilian government employees to pay for the growing costs of the war on terrorism. In the past, the issue of raising congressional pay has been a hot political topic that members of each party have exploited to paint their ideological foes as greedy and self-serving. Recently, pay raises have lost political potency as party leaders have sought to deflect...