The city employees' complaints followed on a similar protest by state teachers, who complained about a 0.5 percent cut in their pay this year. They would get an additional 10 hours off to compensate for the loss of salary. Non-teaching state employees have also protested Gov. Bev Perdue's effort to reduce the $3 billion budget deficit through unpaid furloughs of workers.
As painful as it may be to lose 0.5 percent of your pay (even some judges, who make more than $100,000 a year, said they just couldn't afford it), imagine how painful it would be to lose 100 percent of your salary. That's the situation many thousands of North Carolinians are in. North Carolina's unemployment rate has has leveled off at 10.8 percent, one of the highest rates in the country. Wilson County's unemployment is over 13 percent. Those people know what a loss of pay really feels like.
Being forced to accept a slight pay cut or being denied an expected cost-of-living increase might be painful and it might mess up your fiscal planning, but, believe me, it's nothing compared to being laid off and losing all of your income. During the final three years of my newspaper career, my employer imposed a cost-saving wage freeze. There were plenty of complaints, especially from people lower on the pay scale who were struggling to pay their bills. But I did not complain; my wife and I were getting by on our take-home, and I understood the loss of newspaper revenue mandated drastic action. The complaints about frozen pay quieted when co-workers began disappearing as the layoffs began. Frozen pay? Unpaid furloughs? They're not nearly as bad as layoffs, and state employees should remember that.
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