Skip to main content

Wonder if Jack Markell and the folks at Leg Hall are reading this...

... in which the Feds are threatening California with the loss of billions of dollars of stimulus money if the Governator and the General Assembly follow through with a pay cut for unionized home health care workers?

From the LATimes:

Reporting from Sacramento -- The Obama administration is threatening to rescind billions of dollars in federal stimulus money if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers do not restore wage cuts to unionized home healthcare workers approved in February as part of the budget.

Schwarzenegger's office was advised this week by federal health officials that the wage reduction, which will save California $74 million, violates provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Failure to revoke the scheduled wage cut before it takes effect July 1 could cost California $6.8 billion in stimulus money, according to state officials.

The news comes as state lawmakers are already facing a severe cash crisis, with the state at risk of running out of money in July.

The wages at issue involve workers who care for some 440,000 low-income disabled and elderly Californians. The workers, who collectively contribute millions of dollars in dues each month to the influential Service Employees International Union and the United Domestic Workers, will see the state's contribution to their wages cut from a maximum of $12.10 per hour to a maximum of $10.10.

The SEIU said in a statement that it had asked the Obama administration for the ruling.


Of course, that was May 8, before the Obama administration backed down:

On Wednesday, the Obama administration said that California's decision to cut the state's contribution to home health care workers' wages will not affect the state's eligibility for $8 billion for Medi-Cal provided through the federal economic stimulus package, the Sacramento Bee reports.

Medi-Cal is California's Medicaid program.

The wage cuts affect workers participating in the In-Home Supportive Services program. A provision of the state budget approved in February reduced the state's contribution to the workers' wages from a maximum of $12.10 to $10.10 an hour (Hotakainen, Sacramento Bee, 5/20).

Unions representing the workers complained to the Obama administration, arguing that the cut violated a provision of the stimulus package that bars states from shifting costs to counties.

However, in a letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), federal officials wrote that the reduced state contribution to the wages does not violate the stimulus law because it does not require counties to increase their contribution to IHSS workers' wages (Freking, AP/San Francisco Chronicle, 5/20).


You'd have to wonder why.

Of course it couldn't have anything to do with lucrative $15,200/plate Beverly Hills fundraisers.

But more importantly, you'd have to wonder how the possibility that the Feds might raise the same sort of issue in Delaware might play in the face of unified opposition from virtually all state employee labor unions.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Be afraid. The federal government is puffing out it's chest by holding "dollar, dollar bills ya'll" over the state's heads? Unfortunately this goes on all too often already. I read a while back about how federal highway dollars are tied to the state blood alochol limits for DUIs. It's about control and the feds are out of control with their power grabbing tactics and strong arming the states!

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?