It certainly looks that way.
When I asked a county employee why so many of his county government cohorts had signed up as election judges in our precinct, he told me that Jim Smith offered them a sweet deal. Apparently they got the regular poll-worker pay of $162.50 PLUS their regular salary for the day PLUS an extra vacation day.
If you assume county fringe benefits amount to 50% of salary, then an employee making $21k in salary would get the equivalent of $402. That's 2.5 times the amount paid to regular folks. And someone making $85,000 in salary would take in a whopping $1,122 for one day of work at the polls. That's 7 times the amount paid to regular folks.
Somehow, that doesn't sound fair.
Thank you for brining this outrage to the public's attention. I worked at a polling place Tuesday and was unaware of this disparity in compensation.
ReplyDeleteIt was not just the sixteen and one-half hours on Tuesday, BTW. Monday evening, a few of us spent several hours unpacking equipment and setting up as much as could be done without unsealing the voting machines, so we could be assured of starting on the dot of 7 AM.
Among our team were two or three people who were not pulling their share of the load, and now that I know about this deal with Smith, I wonder whether the slackers were also county employees.
BTW, Smith himself will collect three pensions from the county when he (finally!) retires in 2010.