“General Motors will cut 10,000 jobs, or 14% of its salaried work force, this year as the auto maker struggles to cope with a steep drop in world-wide vehicle sales,” reports the Wall Street Journal today. “The job cuts are part of the plan the company submitted to Congress in December to secure bailout funding from the federal government. Also, most salaried employees will see a 3% to 7% pay cut, while executives will get a 10% reduction.”
There’s something to mull over here for the Nevada Legislature.
Right now Gov. Gibbons has only proposed salary reductions for government workers of just six percent – which is actually only 2 percent when you consider they just got a 4 percent raise that they probably shouldn’t have in this economy last July.
But what about layoffs?
The governor, for whatever reason, has bent over backwards to avoid laying off non-essential government workers the way the private sector has been laying off workers. If GM has to lay off 14 percent of its work force, in addition to cutting salaries, why shouldn’t the Nevada state government lay off large numbers of non-essential workers instead of limiting immunizations for poor kids and taking away wheelchairs from elderly folks?
And as for executive salaries, isn’t it time to pass a law mandating that no taxpayer-funded government employee be paid more than the governor himself? I mean, why should a college professor who teaches classes two or three times a week be paid more than the state’s chief executive?
