Opinion: State employees take it off -- 13 times a year
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| At least one public servant -- President-elect Barack Obama -- recently vacationed in this Hawaii home. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia) |
Out of numbers as big as California’s 42-billion-dollar budget hole, it’s always the comparatively small numbers that irk and annoy us voters and taxpayers -- maybe because those are the only ones we can wrap our heads around.
That’s how I felt about my colleague George Skelton’s revelations about the cornucopia of paid holidays enjoyed by state employees.
State employees get more than twice as many paid holidays as most of us do, me included -- 13. They get both national and state holidays: New Year’s Day, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, both Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays, Cesar Chavez Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
State employees’ complaints about forced unpaid furlough days as part of broad budget-cutting would resonate a lot more deeply and sympathetically were they not already getting so many paid holidays.
In the meantime, the only thing I get out of all these state holidays is light traffic on the freeways, on the days when I’m working -- and they’re not.