City council unanimously waved through some tweaks to the City employee personnel policy lately. Not surprising, considering most of City council do not now (nor have they ever) worked in the private sector where money is earned as opposed to shaken from the taxpayer wallet.
First up was adding some more longevity pay to the workers there a really long time. Some of the dumber council members (Williamson, for example) in the past have expressed concerns that pay isn’t competitive here and that City workers might leave. Yet on the other hand, we have more than a few workers who have been with the City 18, 20, 23 years or longer. Kind of kills that argument, wouldn’t you say?
Vacation time is generous too. As you can see below:
Remember, 15 days of vacation is three weeks off!
Then there are the “sick days”. Those “accrue at the rate of 3.69 hours per biweekly pay period” according to the pay policy. There are 26 biweekly pay periods in a year, so at the end of the year you have about 96 hours of sick leave built up. Or ANOTHER 2.5 weeks of paid time off.
This even applies to part time workers of at least 20 hours! Pretty nice benefit!
Better yet, those sick days can be carried over to the next year! You are allowed to accrue up to “a maximum allowable accumulation of 1040 hours, which is ONE HALF of a regular year of 2080 hours“.
Of course, Finley NEVER EVER talks about “benefits” when he is up at the dais pushing for pay increases every year. He ONLY talks about salaries. But as you can see, the benefits are quite nice as well.
Did I mention the City ALSO spends over $200,000 EVERY MONTH on retirement and medical benefits for employees? That works out to roughly $24,000 per year PER employee just in health and retirement bennies.
Even WITH all this paid time off, some workers manage to work even LESS! We’ll get into that in the next post using some real-life paystub hours from one of our favorite employees!