Roughly 700 state workers covered by SEIU Local 1000 will receive back wages from an furlough lawsuit agreement between the union and Gov. Jerry Brown's administration.
The deal, which we first reported earlier this afternoon, also dumps four much larger furlough lawsuits that the union was pressing in Northern California trial courts.
Only Local 1000 employees at First 5 California, the Prison Industry Authority, the California Earthquake Authority, the California Housing Finance Agency and the Office of Administrative Hearings will receive back pay without interest for the days that they were forced to take off without pay in 2009 and 2010. State workers represented by other bargaining units and managers in those organizations aren't part of the settlement, said Lynelle Jolley, spokeswoman for the state Department of Personnel Administration.
The agreement is a good deal for the state on two fronts:
• It costs taxpayers nothing, since all five departments are completely self-funded -- which was the basis of the argument that their employees shouldn't have been put on furlough in the first place.
• SEIU also agreed to drop four other furlough lawsuits pending in Alameda, Sacramento and San Francisco courts, Jolley said. Those lawsuits had the potential to cost the state tens of millions of dollars in back wages and interest for roughly 80,000 of the 95,000 workers the local represents. The litigation argued that for a variety of reasons furlough policy itself was illegal, not merely its application to a select departments.
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