This morning on Fox’s America’s Newsroom in an interview conducted by Bill Hemmer, Carol Bowshier, the chief of staff for the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association says:
Well the fact is, we could lay off every state worker in Ohio. Every police officer, every firefighter, every corrections officer and we would only close 1/4 of the $8Billion gap.
I call Bulls#!/ on Ms. Bowshier, because her assumption means the average salary of each public service employee is under $13,000 a year which we all know is simply not the case.
As Bill stated at the beginning of the interview, this would affect all 330,000 state employees.
So do the math. If the WHOLE $8Billion was being laid on the union workers (which it is not) then all we have to do is take the $8 Billion divided by 330,000 and we get a measly $24242 per employee (over 2 years meaning the actual per employee cost to eliminate the $8Billion is only $12,121 per year).
And add in the fact that the $8Billion is NOT being solely burdened by the public union workers, these austerity moves by Ohio will likely be able to put the state into a surplus situation.
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There could be legislated entitlements for these state workers that pay out when they are laid off. Depending on how huge they are, this could be a scandal in itself and could account for the number discrepancy.