State high court upholds worker furloughs

The state Supreme Court upheld Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's furloughs of 200,000 state employees today, saying the Legislature had ratified his decision to order workers to take three days off each month without pay.A lower court had ruled that Schwarzenegger's furlough orders in February and July 2009 violated state laws and union contracts that protected employee workweeks. That ruling, if upheld, could have entitled workers to more than $1 billion in back pay and interest.

But the state's high court ruled unanimously that lawmakers gave the governor the powers he needed in a February 2009 fiscal bill that cut spending for employee pay by exactly the amount that Schwarzenegger proposed to save with furloughs.

That bill said the state should achieve those savings through union negotiations or "existing administration authority," a phrase that "reasonably included the furlough program," Chief Justice Ronald George said in today's ruling.

Schwarzenegger initially furloughed workers for two days a month in February 2009 and added a third day five months later. He said the furloughs would save the state $1.4 billion a year.

His actions amounted to a nearly 15 percent pay cut for the employees and shut down agencies including the Employment Development Department and the Department of Motor Vehicles on the first three Fridays of each month.

By upholding the 2009-10 furloughs, the court indicated that Schwarzenegger also acted legally in a second round of furloughs, starting this past August, that have idled 144,000 state employees three days a month.

In a separate ruling today, the justices unanimously upheld Schwarzenegger's reductions of nearly $500 million in state spending, mostly from health and social service programs, from a 2009-10 budget bill.

Lawmakers had already cut $15 billion in previously approved spending in the bill they sent to the governor in July 2009. Schwarzenegger said the reductions did not go far enough to reduce the state deficit and vetoed additional funding.

Opponents, including Democratic leaders and a group of health clinics, battered women's shelters and other targeted programs, argued that the money the Legislature was cutting in the bill did not amount to appropriations, so Schwarzenegger did not have the power to make line-item vetoes. The court disagreed, saying the governor has authority to cut or eliminate any spending approved by lawmakers.

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