Jasmine Bess has held down a good job at the Department of Motor Vehicles for the past seven years. She isn't used to asking for charity.

Three unpaid furlough days each month, erasing 14 percent of her income, have hit her budget so hard that by the end of August, she couldn't afford to feed her 9-year-old daughter, Chocolate.

So on the last "Furlough Friday" of August, she swallowed her pride and stood in line at River City Food Bank in midtown Sacramento.

"I went because I was completely out of food," said Bess, 47, a single mother who rents a house in Natomas. "I'd never done that before. I could buy my own groceries."

Happy Labor Day, California state workers.

Valued for its stability – and derided by some for its stagnancy – state employment has lately become a more tenuous proposition. Security of steady pay and guaranteed retirement benefits are under fire in the ongoing state budget battle.

And organized labor, which for decades helped lift workers into the middle class by advocating for better salaries and benefits, now is trying to help state employees just hang on to what they have.

For some lower-paid state-government employees, the financial outlook has become so grim that Service Employees International Union Local 1000 has posted links on its Web site to food banks, utility discounts, housing subsidies and other forms of assistance. The local represents 95,000 state workers, including almost half of California's civil service work force.

"Labor is about growing the middle class," said SEIU Local 1000 spokesman Jim Herron Zamora. "Now we are ironically and tragically involved in an effort to make a lifeline available to keep people from falling through the bottom.

"Our backbone is solidly middle class," he added. "This is embarrassing to them. These are blue-collar and white-collar folks who work. They don't see themselves as people who need public assistance or sympathy."

In one state Department of Social Services office in Sacramento, managers have mobilized, setting up an informal food pantry to help employees having trouble making ends meet, according to a union official.

"It's a goodwill effort by management," said Pam Manwiller, state programs director for American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 2620, which represents 5,000 state workers in health and social services agencies.

"We have folks who've faced foreclosure," Manwiller said. "This is where we are now, and we don't know that it won't get worse. It's really hitting folks."

It's hitting Isabel Aviña, 58, an office tech for the Department of Consumer Affairs since 1988.

A single mother, she went on welfare briefly in the early 1980s – but as she plugged along through college and into the state work force, she was determined never again to ask for a handout. She bought a modest house in Sacramento's Valley Hi neighborhood, and she made sure she paid her bills on time.

Then came the furloughs. Aviña, as well, found herself in line at River City Food Bank late in August.

"I'm standing there thinking, 'What am I doing here? I have a job. I work for the state,' " Aviña said. "But it was toward the end of the month. What are you supposed to do? I have to pay the bills."

State employees are paid on the first day of the month – so by the third furlough Friday, many are facing the reality of too many bills and too little money in the bank.

Renee Lee, 52, a Franchise Tax Board employee and a shop steward for SEIU, is raising her 5-year-old granddaughter. She hasn't yet hit the food banks, but she's considering it.

"I have to feed this girl," Lee said. "I'll feed her, and I won't eat."

Her south Sacramento house is in foreclosure because of her reduced paycheck, she said.

"In the past, we'd only get an occasional state worker who'd hit a bump in the road," said River City Food Bank executive director Eileen Thomas. "Most of them now are incredibly embarrassed. They're very angry this is happening to them. One of them said, 'If I had a bag, I'd put it over my head.' "

Not surprisingly, the food closet at Carmichael Presbyterian Church also has seen increased demand from the working poor, said director Jack Roach. And Sacramento Food Bank's mobile food project – which brings donations to a dozen remote locations at times convenient to the employed but struggling – is averaging 1,000 clients a month at each site. In June it was 530 clients a month, said president Blake Young.

"We've seen some state workers," he said. "We're seeing so many new people."

Calls to the state's employee assistance program, which provides financial and legal consultation as well as help with stress management, have doubled in the past year, said Department of Personnel Administration spokeswoman Lynelle Jolley.

"Most people in this economy are living paycheck to paycheck," said Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, which advocates for the working poor. "Not a lot of people can afford to lose 15 percent of their paycheck, even if they're very careful in the obligations they take on.

"And there's no end in sight," Ross added. "When you look at the budget forecast for the state, we're looking at red ink as far as the eye can see."

Isabel Aviña made a little money at a recent yard sale. A talented seamstress, she's considering selling purses she designed. Jasmine Bess simply hopes for the best.

"Everybody's so scared," she said. "I open my wallet, and I think, 'Did I lose my money?' No, you never had it."

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