SACRAMENTO — The notion that the only safe job in a recession is a state Civil Service job was punctured this week when a Sacramento court gave the governor the authority to take an ax to the government payroll.
Thursday's Superior Court ruling, which greenlighted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to shut down much of state government on two Fridays each month -- forcing 238,000 mostly unionized workers to stay home without pay -- follows decades in which the state workforce remained relatively impervious to financial crises.
Governors have long tried -- and mostly failed -- to reverse the growth of the state payroll when deficits have soared. Even as private companies lay off tens of thousands of workers, the state employment rolls tend to remain impenetrable.
Past plans for reductions have been tangled in a thicket of policy protections, political alliances and legal precedents that organized labor has built up over the years. Delays in scheduled pay raises or trims in generous worker benefit packages are typically the extent of what governors wrangle from the unions.
Cutting the state workforce "is just very difficult to do," said Jason Dickerson, a public employment expert at the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office. "It can be a very long and cumbersome process."
Personnel records show that there have been no mass layoffs in state government since 1975, when 2,500 California Department of Transportation employees lost their jobs during a budget crunch.
Schwarzenegger sidestepped the layoff process by opting for furloughs. Whether his plan to save $1.3 billion that way will survive the court appeal process remains to be seen.
Gov. Pete Wilson attempted a similar move in 1991. He used his emergency powers to cut the salaries of most of the state workforce by 5%. A state court judge ultimately ruled that the governor could not do so without the consent of the Legislature, and the money was eventually returned to employees in cash or vacation time.
Wilson also threatened to lay off 10,000 state workers that same year, when California was facing a $14.1-billion deficit. It never happened. Wilson abandoned the idea after years of battle with public employee unions.
Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 put plans in motion to lay off some 12,000 workers, sending them notices that the state had begun the lengthy process of eliminating their jobs. That process can involve six to eight months of appeal hearings, paperwork processing and negotiations between the state and unions. Those layoffs never happened either.
