Government Employees

SACRAMENTO -- Now that the state is no longer in the grips of a budget crisis, public employee unions are optimistic that they finally have some leverage to negotiate a raise. Will Gov. Jerry Brown hold the line on spending, as he has vowed, and keep salaries in check? The Times' Chris Megerian takes a look at the issue in a article Monday. He writes that contracts for almost half of the state's 350,000 employees come due this summer. And the biggest unions negotiating them will be sitting across the bargaining table from an administration grateful for all that the unions did to help pass Brown's tax-hike plan in November.

Los Angeles union leaders had hoped the presence of two liberal Democrats in the race for mayor would produce a robust defense of the value of government, government employees and the positive effects public sector pay and benefits have on the broader economy. The realities of campaigning have largely precluded that, particularly in a city contending with persistent budget shortfalls and private-sector workers facing stagnant incomes, tax and fee increases, and a slow erosion of good-wage jobs.

Mexican police arrested 42 current and former government employees in connection with a large migrant-trafficking ring, officials announced. The suspects were from 12 of Mexico's 31 states, and the network allegedly smuggled Cubans, Uruguayans, Brazilians, Central Americans and Asians into the United States. Those arrested included agents and ex-agents of the National Immigration Institute, the agency Mexico relies on to ferret out illegal migrants.

In attacking the Internal Revenue Service for a training video parodying the TV show “Star Trek,” critics have not very boldly gone where many have gone before -- to a political universe in which government employees are pilloried for practices that are common in the private sector. You probably have heard that the IRS spent $60,000 to produce a video parodying the 1960s space opera, which spawned several spinoffs in movies and on TV. The video features the adventures of the "Starship Enterprise Y,” whose mission is to “seek out new tax forms, to explore strange new regulations, to boldly go where no governmental employee has gone before.” The stand-in for Capt.

SOUTH AFRICA An estimated 800,000 government workers demanding higher pay and more benefits walked off the job in what union leaders called the biggest strike in South African history. Police officers, prison guards, nurses and other government workers deemed essential were prohibited from striking. Tens of thousands of workers marched peacefully in several cities to press their demands for a 7% raise, medical insurance and a housing allowance.

Ventura County government's largest labor union approved a tentative contract Friday, potentially ending its most acrimonious salary battle in a decade. Under the agreement, 4,200 general government workers would receive wage hikes averaging 13% over a four-year period. If the contract is quickly ratified, employees will see the pay raise beginning in their Oct. 18 checks, union leaders said.

They made it through the holidays all right, annoyed that the second government shutdown in two months had put a dent in Christmas but hanging on to the near-certainty that all of this would end with the new year. Then the new year came and it did not end. For hundreds of thousands of federal workers, Jan. 1 was not the usual joyful renaissance of resolutions and fresh starts.

This time, Bob Clark, a customs inspector on the U.S.-Mexico border at San Ysidro, Calif., is genuinely nervous. Clark knows that each fall, when budget negotiations between the White House and Congress bog down, the government threatens to lay off thousands of federal employees as a way of living within its means. Most of the workers usually take those threats with a grain of salt, because the layoffs almost never occur; the last were in 1982.

Mirroring trends nationwide, healthcare costs for Ventura County government workers will increase up to 18% in 2005, the fifth consecutive year the county has seen double-digit increases in health premiums, according to a new report and county officials. "This is a national problem -- trying to deal with the rising costs of healthcare," said Barry Zimmerman, a benefits manager in the Human Resources Division.

Government employees accused their bosses in the Western office of the Resolution Trust Corp. of lying to Congress, abusing their positions and wasting as much as $500 million in taxpayer funds trying to clean up failed California thrifts.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Civilian deaths in the war in Afghanistan dropped in 2012 for the first time in six years, a sign of lessening hostilities, but insurgents dramatically expanded their campaign of assassinating government supporters, the United Nations said Tuesday. The annual U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan documented a 12% decline in deaths, largely because of fewer ground operations, new limits on airstrikes by U.S.-led coalition forces and fewer suicide bombings by insurgents.

SACRAMENTO -- Now that the state is no longer in the grips of a budget crisis, public employee unions are optimistic that they finally have some leverage to negotiate a raise. Will Gov. Jerry Brown hold the line on spending, as he has vowed, and keep salaries in check? The Times' Chris Megerian takes a look at the issue in a article Monday. He writes that contracts for almost half of the state's 350,000 employees come due this summer. And the biggest unions negotiating them will be sitting across the bargaining table from an administration grateful for all that the unions did to help pass Brown's tax-hike plan in November.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli officials promised Wednesday to transfer one-month's worth of Palestinian tax collections to the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority. But Israel cautioned that the move does not necessarily signal the transfers will resume as usual and that the step was taken to enable the authority to handle its ongoing budgetary crisis. The money, about $100 million a month, is collected at Israeli ports from Palestinian importers and is supposed to be forwarded to the West Bank.

The youthful head of a self-styled Alaska militia that collected firearms and grenades and talked of killing judges and government employees was sentenced Tuesday to more than 25 years in prison, despite his lawyer's claim that he suffered from paranoid delusions. Prosecutors had sought 35 years for  Schaeffer Cox , who had gained a following in far-right circles across the West with his message that the government had strayed from its constitutional authority. Secretly  he and his followers began accumulating weaponry and plotting retribution.  Tuesday's hearing in Anchorage marked a substantial turnaround for the 28-year-old former leader of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia, who spent his trial in May and June denying wrongdoing and accusing the government of putting his political beliefs on trial.

Landslide victories on ballot measures to cut pension costs in two major California cities emboldened reform advocates, who said they expect a flurry of copycat initiatives and increased support for Gov. Jerry Brown's long-stalled push to curb the state's obligations to its employees. In San Jose, nearly 70% of voters Tuesday approved a plan that gives workers the choice between increasing their pension contribution to 13% of their pay, currently 5% to 11%, or switching to a lower-cost plan with reduced benefits.

Hundreds of thousands of teachers, police workers, immigration officers and other government employees walked off the job Thursday across Britain in a mass strike that could augur a summer of industrial action over deep cuts in public spending. The picket lines went up to protest proposed changes to state-sponsored pension plans, which would require public-sector workers to increase their contributions, retire later and collect less than they do now. The government says overhauling the system is imperative in light of the country's huge budget deficit and Britons' longer lifespans.

A proposal to dramatically increase pensions paid to Orange County government workers is meeting resistance from some younger workers who say they don't want to pay for the increased benefits. At issue is a portion of a proposed three-year labor contract that would allow some veteran employees to retire next year with significantly higher pensions at the expense of younger workers, who will pick up the increased costs through larger contributions to the county pension system.

Ventura County employees arriving at work in twos and threes at the Government Center and 140 other county offices will be tallied next week as the county takes its semi-annual survey to learn how many share rides to their jobs. The survey is intended to determine whether the county government is meeting its goals for reducing air pollution by cutting down on the number of people who drive alone to work.

Checking out state workers' salaries Re "State turns up more big salaries," Feb. 2 So California state Controller John Chiang has demanded salary information from nearly 900 local government entities. The report is part of Chiang's effort to document the compensation of all government officials and employees in the state. I would hope that this will include state employees in general, and University of California and California State University administrators in particular.

By a unanimous vote, the Supreme Court has ruled that contract employees at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory must undergo the same background checks ? including questions about drug abuse and treatment ? that are required of government employees. The decision is defensible on the grounds of consistency, and such checks are a long-established feature of both public and private employment. But privacy advocates still have reason to cheer this decision. The court could have held that people have no right to withhold personal information from the government, but most of the justices declined to do so. Instead, in his majority opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. assumed for the purposes of argument that Americans have a constitutional right to "informational privacy" that limits what the government can require of them.