Government Employees

Ernest Gustafson, who administered the largest amnesty program in the country as Los Angeles district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said he will retire in March. A successor has not been named. The once-obscure office became a hot seat when the Immigration Reform and Control Act was signed into law in 1986, and the five-county INS district processed 1,179,000 amnesty applications--44% of the nationwide total.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gathered over financial statements and chocolate-covered strawberries at a Dana Point resort, trustees of Orange County's employee retirement system heard the bad news. Like many ordinary Americans' 401(k) plans, the county pension fund is losing money for the third straight year, thanks to debilitating stock market declines. The fund, which has fallen to about $4.3 billion from $4.

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.

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.

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.

The earthquake that leveled Haiti exposed fundamental weaknesses in its state institutions. Worldwide pledges of $10 billion create an unprecedented opportunity to fix them. Haiti's own plans for recovery, presented to its international donors in March, contained a broad vision but no road map to prioritize and fix urgent needs. It is not enough to raise stronger buildings. What Haiti truly needs is a more resilient and effective government, starting with these key areas: Establishing an attractive business climate.

A veteran Orange County district attorney's investigator who was fired after he refused to drop his probe into one of the district attorney's close friends and political contributors has, for a second time, won back his job and will probably get more than $1 million in back pay. Lyle Wilson was fired in 2002 for his handling of an investigation into the business dealings of Patrick Di Carlo, a wealthy Newport Beach businessman and supporter of...

Threats this week by Los Angeles' powerful municipal utility to withhold $73 million from the treasury helped reveal a city that has become increasingly dependent on indirect and onetime sources of revenue to pay its bills. Combined with the worst economic decline since the Depression, those dwindling sources of cash have forced city officials to confront a problem they have long tried to ignore -- a steady growth of the city payroll for the last decade. The city's core 35,000-member workforce increased by at least 3,000 between 2000 and 2009.

With every seat filled in the Los Angeles City Council chambers Wednesday, Anita Edwards had one minute to make her case before the buzzer cut her off. "I'm here because I'm fighting for my job," said the 51-year-old city child-care director, one of hundreds of employees expecting a pink slip by July. "I love what I do and that's why I've stayed dedicated to this city for 18 years." For as long as anyone can remember, city leaders have neatly balanced their books by eliminating vacant positions and shifting money between accounts.

In one of her last acts as speaker of the state Assembly, Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) quietly doled out 10% pay raises and promotions to 20 of her staff members. The raises, which Bass approved last week on her final day as speaker, come as California continues to grapple with an estimated $20-billion deficit. More than 200,000 rank-and-file state workers have been forced to take three unpaid furlough days each month, the equivalent of a 14% pay cut, to help balance the state's books.

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.

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.

Like many other state employees, prison nurse Nellie Larot was hit last year with furloughs that cut her salary: It dropped $10,000, to $92,000. But she more than made up for it by working extra shifts, raking in $177,512 in overtime, according to state records. Her total $270,000 in earnings last year eclipsed the $225,000 paid to Matthew Cate, head of the entire state prison system. Despite Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision to furlough workers three days a month to save money, many employees are taking home paychecks fattened by overtime -- more than $1 billion of it last year.

A half a dozen mourners gathered at Forest Lawn cemetery in Cypress on Friday to bid farewell to a woman they never knew. Jean Comstock died Sept. 24, a 79-year-old divorced woman without heirs. Comstock, a retired Long Beach city minute clerk, had wanted to be buried at Forest Lawn but couldn't afford it. Los Angeles County cremated her and stored the ashes at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights. Eventually the ashes would have been buried in a pauper's grave with the rest of the county's unclaimed dead.